Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a subject that interests me and I have quite a bit of experience and success in its practical implementation. Recently I have been in blogging mood so I am writing this post to share what I know about SEO and search engine marketing in general. Search Engine Optimisation can be defined in many ways.
- It is the process of generating the maximum amount of relevant visitors to a web page from the organic or unpaid listings of the major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo
- It is the process of increasing the visibility of a website and its individual web pages in the organic Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) of the major search engines
- It is the quest to be ‘Number 1 in Google’
- It is the process of maximizing ‘free’ traffic or visitors to a website
There are many more, and probably better, definitions of what Search Engine Optimisation is but those listed above serve as a good starting point. When I think of SEO the words of the great Pink Floyd song “Us And Them” come to mind:
“Haven’t you heard it’s a battle of words
The poster bearer cried”
There are many factors to consider in Search Engine Optimisation. Firstly, SEO is a process and a never ending process at that. Secondly, SEO applies to every web page of your website, not just your home page or major category pages, every single page. It is not a case of getting your website to be ‘number 1 in Google’ because it’s not a battle of websites, it’s a battle of web pages and ultimately, and more importantly, it’s a battle of words. As a website owner you should have complete control over the content of your web pages and therefore you have the power to make your web pages as relevant as possible to your target audience. A few years back I worked for a major multi national corporation whose motto was: “Think of yourself as a customer”. Ok, it was a bank, and yes I did think of the irony of the motto every time I spoke to a customer 
. However, the point is they took this motto seriously, so seriously that it was written in individual brass letters over every door in every one of their offices worldwide. In the case of SEO, you really have to think of yourself as a potential visitor to your web site. Remember every visitor is a potential customer and with typical sales conversion rates of 2-3% on many ebusiness websites, every visitor that becomes a customer can be very valuable to your business. It may be called Search Engine Optimisation, but it is a process of optimising each web page to make its content relevant to potential customers in your target market as much as it is optimising for search engines. There are some basic guidelines you should follow if you want to optimise your web pages for both search engines and actual human visitors. From more than ten years of experience in the Internet business, here are my SEO Golden Rules, my ten SEO Commandments if you like:
- Content is King – Have good quality compelling content that people find useful. Whether your are selling paper clips, sun holidays, cars or houses, keyword rich relevant content is the primary ingredient for success.
- Titles & Metadata – Make sure that each web page has individual, proper, consistent and relevant <title> and <h1> tags. If the topic of your web page is paper clips, then be sure you have the key words ‘paper’ and ‘clips’ within the <title> and <h1> tags of your HTML source code.
- Domain Name & Search Engine Friendly URLs – If the topic of your web page is paper clips and if your domain name was www.paperclips.com that would have a hugely positive impact on your ratings. You should also be sure that the filename of the page contains the key words ‘paper’ and ‘clips’. The URL of your page should be something like http://www.yoursite.com/paper-clips.html.
- Keyword Rich Content – Be sure that the keywords that you want to rank well for in SERP’s appear in the content of your web page. It is obvious and it should happen naturally anyway, but keep it in mind. Don’t try to cram your web pages with keywords as it could have a negative impact on your ratings and it just wont read well for visitors. Focus on how your page reads to an actual human being not a search engine and your page will rate well.
- A Trail of Breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs are used to indicate to visitors where they are in a website relevant to the home page and other categories. If you are selling external hard drives, and these products are in the computer hardware category then your breadcrumb trail should reflect this. You should have a trail like this, usually above the title of your page content: Home – Computers – Hardware – External Hard Drives. The user can then see where they are in the context of your website and can broaden or narrow their results by clicking on the appropriate breadcrumb link. The breadcrumb links also help your search engine rating by providing relevant keywords and links to other pages for their spiders or bots to index.
- Relevant Link Text – Like having a breadcrumb trail to enable easy movement from one category to another, hyper links to other webpages are important. Try not to fall into the ‘Click Here’ trap. If you are linking to a page about ‘Toshiba External Hard Drives’ use the keywords themselves as the anchor text for the link instead of using ‘Click Here’ as the anchor text. Yes I know this is simple stuff, but this is SEO not rocket science. Watch out for the “SEO Professionals” who try to make it sound more complicated than it really is. My advice is to use your own personal ‘search engine’, aka your brain, to figure out if they can help you or are just spoofing you.
- Valid XHTML and CSS – Try to write clean HTML and CSS. Most of the popular open source content management systems can take care of this for you. I use WordPress for this blog and it is very Search Engine friendly. Go to www.w3c.org and www.w3schools.com for more information about XHTML and CSS. Note the use of alt tags on the links too .
- Create an XML Sitemap – A sitemap is essentially an XML file, usually called Sitemap.xml located in the root directory, that lists all the web pages in your website. It is a complete list of all the URLs on your website and makes it easier for Search Engines to index your web pages. Have a look at Google Webmaster Tools and this page about XML Sitemaps.
- Relevant image filenames and alt tags – You must try to maximise the use of every web page resource to make it as relevant as possible to the keyword searches you wish to rate highly for. If your web page is about ‘Toshiba External Hard Drives’ then make sure that you use these keywords in the name of any image file on the page, and also use relevant keywords in the alt tags of the image. It is much more relevant if your image filename is ‘toshiba-external-hard-drives.jpg’ than if you call it ‘sku12345.jpg’.
- Quality Inbound Links – One of the criteria Google use in their search algorithm is the quantity and quality of inbound links to your web page. The more and the more reputable your inbound links the better. Using the external hard drive example, if I could get Toshiba to link to my web page that would greatly improve my Search Engine rating. Get as many quality inbound links as you can from suppliers, blogs, web directories, customers etc. Social media websites can be used to generate awareness and drive traffic but I am not sure how effective these tactics are in terms of improving your ratings on the likes of Google.
The above ten SEO Commandments or Golden Rules are a good basis to guide you in the process of optimising your web pages so that they rate highly in search engine results pages. Of course there are more factors to consider like the size of your web pages, how quick they load in a browser, cross browser compatibility, where the site is hosted, how often the pages are updated etc, but I think I have covered the essential ingredients of SEO here. Comments are greatly welcome, and if you have gotten this far it means you found this web page via some search and you have had the patience or interest to read as far as here
One of the reasons I went to the trouble of writing this post was not only to share what I know about SEO and SEM, but also to test the quality of this page and to see if it is optimised for the keywords I wish people to find this page on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Of course social networks are becoming so pervasive now and websites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are being used as pseudo search engines, so much so that they are seen as a potential threat to Google’s core search business. It will be an interesting experiment to ‘Tweet’ a link to this page and see if it flies, so to speak.
If you wish to contact me about any aspect of your SEO or SEM strategy, please email danny [at] dannyogrady.com, I’d be delighted to speak with you. In the meantime, focus on the process of SEO and you will profit from your success.
Danny
