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.