SEO is an evolving study of the factors which search engines use to ‘rank’ you in their natural listings.

When we search for anything, up come the natural search lists. They’re in addition to the PPC lists. On the major Search Engines, you’ll see a box at the top, and a column down the right hand side. These are the paid adverts. The ‘natural’ listings are straight from the main index. They show sites listed in the order of importance and relevance - according to their algorithm.

Of course, we would like to be as high as possible on page one. No-one’s going to find us if we’re listed on page seven. We can’t know for sure about all the criteria Google and the like use to rank us. It’s not in the SE’s interest to tell people everything they do.

Nevertheless, an entire industry has evolved around Search Engine listings. On the one hand there are SE’s purposely filing a wide array of new patents. Causing much mystification about their methods! On the other side you have an SEO industry. This utilises a series of tests and measurements to determine the most pertinent factors.

The objective is to maximise both ‘on-page’ and ‘off-page’ optimisation. Off-web criteria also play a part in SE listings, (e.g. demographics). This doesn’t come under the remit of SEO though. For a full discussion of Off-Page factors, please refer to our other article on this subject.

On Page Optimisation

If we can make changes to our site to make it more friendly to Search Engines, this is called ‘on-page’ optimisation. It’s not too complex - it just requires setting up your web site correctly. For example: The correct use and density of keywords and internal linking; H1 and H2 header tags and meta tags.

It doesn’t matter if all that sounds very confusing.

In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. Some would argue its effect is so small it’s irrelevant. There was a time when SE’s were ‘duped’ by On-Page optimisation. Not any longer though.

On-Page can still be important though if Off-Page has been taken care of. If that’s the case, internal linking and a certain amount of on-page fine-tuning can reap rewards.

Some Words Of Caution…

Avoid doing SEO on keywords that have millions of listings. For example, on Google’s Search Engine you’ll see 70 million listings in the UK for the term Car Insurance. It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.

However… When I search for “Southampton Car Insurance”, it comes down to a more manageable 300K. (If car insurance in Southampton was my business!) A big number still it seems - but actually quite a small number when it comes to web searches.

I could expect to get ranked far more easily for the longer phrase. In actual fact, it takes very deep pockets to get a premier listing for a term like ‘car insurance’. I would actually be competing with the insurance conglomerates! So not a great idea - especially, in fact, when there are much better ways to go about it.

We should concentrate on more accurate ‘phrases’ that give us less competition. These ‘long tail’ phrases might contain a number of specific keywords. They could be anything from two to seven words in length. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long.

In general, our recommendation is to begin SEO’ing with keyword phrases that reveal fewer than 500,000 results. (If the sites on the front page haven’t used SEO techniques, then we might go with bigger yields). Over time we’ll gain ground on the larger search terms. This will happen automatically through building back links. If we put in enough effort, we can go after those big phrases in 3-12 months time. This strategy is also far more targeted at the start. We go for the phrases that people who are looking to buy are using.

Don’t just limit building back links to your website’s home page - link them up to various sub pages as well. Google and the other Search Engines like this ‘deep linking’. Try back-linking product group pages. They often have links to several other sub-pages about individual products. So don’t limit the back links to one page. Google and the other SE’s are looking more and more at how individual pages on your site are listed and treated.

Many changes have occurred in the media business in recent years. It is hard to keep up with them since they are occurring so fast. Though social media marketing is a relatively new concept, the average person can now distribute their material over the internet all over the world almost instantly. Media publishing giants like News Corporation and Liberty Media have controlled distribution of news and information all over the globe for 200 years. They have used large media distribution networks in order to do this and they will continue to grow.

Social media has changed the way we communicate. Anyone can distribute material for a business or personally by using a site such as Digg. This opens freedom of speech and distribution of information to everyone. One of the advantages of using this media to distribute your material is that you get feedback on your information in a very timely manner and can tell if it was widely accepted or not. More and more traffic will come to your site when you get lots of favorable reviews. If you get a lot of negative reviews it may be a signal that you need to change your content.

If your information makes it to the first page on Digg this can easily generate up to 200,000 different visitors to our site daily. Other sites such as Slashdot can have the same effect on driving traffic to your site. Since it is so important that your material receives as much traffic as possible some people have tried to manipulate the amount of positive responses to their site. Of course if you are caught doing this you will be banned from the site.

Social media products have recently been created making the distribution of material for your business much easier than in the past. There was a time when internet marketers had to spend many hours submitting their content individually using software to the sites they wanted to use and the tools available to help them such as Social Bookmarker and AddURL still took a lot of time

More and More social media marketing tools will continue to become available. A product called Traffic Android has been released that has the ability to automate time consuming processes such as sign up and submission.

Business competitors are now able to monitor what their competition is doing by reading their blogs on the internet. We are also changing our habits in regard to photos and their distribution. One no longer has to have a very sophisticated camera when a less expensive model, or even a phone, will produce a very good image on the internet and distribution of the photograph is done almost instantly.

It has become so simple to engage with a lot of people through the social media that it has become addictive for many. It can be fun and is a hot topic of conversation among a lot of people. They love to examine every aspect of social media in big feature and love to share their opinions with others. It is easy to become obsessed with this technology and what it has to offer.