Why SEO?

What Is Search Engine Optimization And Why Should I Care?

So you've decided to get yourself a new website and people are talking to you about something called 'search engine optimization' or SEO. Confusing? Well don't worry, it's not that complicated really.

Think of it this way. Your website is like a shopfront, only instead of being on a local street it is online in that magical realm known as cyberspace. When you launch your site for the first time, it is like a shop which has no identity signage and dark windows, which makes it hard if not impossible to know what it is about. People will have no way of locating your site because the search tools on the Web will not be able to find it.

Search engine optimization is a process which is designed to help make websites visible to the search engines like Google and Bing, so that people can find the site by doing a search for a particular subject. Think of it like erecting a nice name sign on the shop, and adding posters to the windows which proclaim the nature of the store and what it is selling. With good SEO your site can attract many more visitors who are interested in what you have to say or sell. Without it, your site can languish in the doldrums with almost no visitors. For businesses this extra traffic can translate into extra profit in hard cash terms!

The Basics

Contrary to what many people believe SEO is not a dark or magic art, it is simply the process of refining the design and content of a website to make it more valuable to a search engine and therefore visitors in general. Let's say your website is for your business as a plumber. If you design your site badly (e.g. it is hard to navigate and read) and you add lots of text and images about carpentry, the search engine may become confused and fail to suggest you as a plumber to people who are searching for plumbers in their area.

If on the other hand, you have optimized the design and content of the site to reflect what a great plumber you are, what area you cover and what particular skills you have, and you have set it all out very clearly, the search engines will be able to categorise your site very easily and suggest your site to visitors looking for a plumber in your area.

There are other factors which make a difference, such as the speed of your site, the quality of the information on the site and relationships with other sites which govern search engine results, but at the end of the day if you have a website which adds real value to the knowledge on the subject you have a much better chance of being served up as a result for a particular search.

The Details

The real truth is that no-one knows exactly what search engines like Google and Bing look for in terms of ranking websites for inclusion at the top of search request pages. It is a closely guarded secret, because the search giants are engaged in a relentless war against spammers who would dearly love to 'game' the system and get their money making scams to the top of the search results for as many search requests as possible. If you have ever done a search and clicked on a link, only to find yourself on a page with very little real content, but a lot of adverts, then you have encountered a successful scam site.

For this reason, most SEO work is done through intelligent guesswork culled from many years of observation as well as hints and tips delivered by the search companies themselves from time to time. The result is a reasonably confident set of 'guidelines' which SEO companies can use to ensure that websites have the best chance of being served as search results, rather than being relegated to the bottom of the results where no-one ever goes, except for curiosity now and then.

There are actually two separate strands of search engine optimization; on-page and off-page.

On-Page.This refers to the work that an SEO consultant does to optimize your website pages for the search engine indexing and valuation process. This includes fixing HTML code errors, tweaking different elements of each page to highlight the key words or phrases you wish to promote and other specific actions they can take to improve the content and navigation flow of your website. It also includes work done specifically on writing content which adds value for your visitors and also improves the flow of information around the web.

Off-Page. refers to activities done by SEO specialists to encourage people to visit your site in one way or another. This can include traditional public relations activity to promote your website to local or general media, as well as approaching relevant blogs, forums, bookmarking and local review services, directories and other sources of valuable links to your site. It may also involve creating valuable and relevant content for use by external agencies which refer/link to your site as an expert resource on the subject matter.

Off-page optimization also includes work done with the increasingly crucial social networking services like Twitter and Facebook, as well as the all important task of monitoring your rankings for chosen keywords. Often these tasks are split out between different specialist agencies, each of which has expertise in a particular sector. The key thing to remember about both on and off-page optimization is that it all has to be done within the guidelines set out by the search engines or risk being penalised for being 'black-hat' SEO, which can get a website banned by the search engine from its listings. And yes, the opposite of that is 'white-hat' SEO, which is the good version.

In order to stay safe and within the guidelines there are certain rules which should be adhered to. The following is a list of the top 11 rules of SEO engagement (culled from Google SEO guidelines).

Rule 1. Value: Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Rule 2. Keywords: Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. Use them naturally in sentences, headlines and links but without repeating them for no good reason.

Rule 3. Keywords2: Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking.

Rule 4. Navigation: Encourage other sites to link to you with natural links, i.e. links which indicate that the other site considers your content to be valuable.

Rule 5. Navigation2: Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. Make sure the links are as descriptive and relevant as possible - try to avoid 'click here' or 'see more' - and try to link only to relevant information offsite.

Rule 6. Navigation3: Provide a site map with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.

Rule 7. Structure: Make sure that your [title] elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate. Make intelligent use of [H] tags (for headings) to emphasise your site's keywords naturally. If possible use descriptive filenames for your image files (e.g. puppy.jpg rather than IMG29298.jpg) to aid in search engine indexing for images.

Rule 8. Integrity: Check for broken links and correct HTML.

Rule 9. Performance: Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web.

Rule 10. Gaming: Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. For example don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

Rule 11. Gaming2: Don't participate in intricate link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank (your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links).

Conclusion

Search Engine Optimization is very much more of an art than a science, primarily because there are so many unknowns involved in trying to 'please' the search engine companies to drive your website up the search engine results page (or SERP as it is known).

Couple this with the fact that search engines change their ranking rules on a regular basis in order to defeat the scammers, and you can see that it is near on impossible to guarantee any kind of result from even the most diligent SEO program. The fact is that even the largest companies can come unstuck and find themselves demoted in the search listings for unwitting infringement of the rules, see this interesting NY Times article for an example: http://tinyurl.com/4qqcvba .

For the rest of us, the best we can do without million dollar budgets is to try and maximize our chance of improving results by following the search engine guidelines and through diligent work to encourage legitimate fertilisation of inbound links from the online world. Properly structured SEO activity does work, and it can result in impressive improvements in search engine listings, however it has to be coupled with genuinely valuable content and properly structured website design in order to provide optimal benefits.

If anyone offers you a quick fix, or a guaranteed top 10 place in the listings, run a mile, as it is extremely likely that they are cutting corners or engaging in outright black-hat SEO tactics which could get your site banned. You may indeed see a quick uplift from these types of services, but in the long run, there is a very strong probability that your site will be caught and demoted; and the road back to search listing redemption is incredibly difficult and can take years. Hard work, intelligent choices and a focus on quality is the best solution for long term success.