SEO is essentially a constantly evolving study of what factors the search engines take into account when they ‚rank‘ you in their natural search listings. Natural or ‚organic‘ lists form the main body of a SE page. Paid listings are separate to natural listings. The paid listings are typically in a yellow section at the top of the page, and in a column down the right hand side. The ’natural‘ listings are straight from the main index. They show sites listed in the order of importance and relevance – according to their algorithm.

Plainly our aim is to get our site up with the top ones. We’ve little chance of being seen if we’re way down the list on page 7. Only those in the Search Engine’s ‚inner circle‘ know all the factors used to position sites. It isn’t something they publicise to the rest of us!

As a result, we now have a very skilled bunch of professionals focused on optimisation. On the Search Engine side you have upgraded technological patents being regularly filed. (To cause as much uncertainty as possible!) On the other hand, there’s Search Engine Optimisation. This utilises a series of tests and measurements to determine the most pertinent factors.

Search Engine Optimisation deals with both on-page and off-page issues. A certain amount of page ranking weight can be attributed to off web geographic influences. SEO can’t control these though. (We will cover off page optimisation in a separate article.)

‚On-Page‘ SEO

Making changes directly to website pages to make them more Search Engine friendly is what On-Page SEO is all about. This website configuration is fairly simple. It involves such factors as – Internal-linking, using H1 & H2 header tags, seeding keywords at the correct density (and in appropriate places,) and to some lesser degree, using meta-tags.

It doesn’t matter if all that sounds very confusing. In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. Indeed, it could be said to basically not have much influence at all. Previously we could make an impact with On Page configurations. Not any longer though.

The only time that ‚on-page‘ becomes important is when you have taken care of ‚off-page‘ and have a lot of inbound ‚back-links‘. At that stage, Internal Linking and some On Page manipulation can be beneficial.

A Bit of Advice… A phrase that shows vast numbers of results should not be your first SEO target. For instance, if you typed into a Search Engine the term Car insurance, seventy million results would be listed for the UK alone. It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.

Although… 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.

The extended phrase makes all the difference. In reality, getting ranked for car insurance would cost a fortune! The competition would be fierce. Not a sensible option for anyone.

A precise description is much more valuable to us. They’re known as long tail searches, because they’ll have several keywords. If your market’s very competitive, you could be selecting seven word phrases. They’re usually around three or four.

We normally recommend performing SEO on phrases that return less than half a million results at the start. (In some cases, we may go with a higher count – if the current page 1 results are not well SEO’d.) In time our back links will grow. Then we’ll get a better rating on some of the bigger yielding phrases. If we put in enough effort, we can go after those big phrases in 3-12 months time. This line of attack starts with more focus. We’re after the people who are really looking to buy, so we go for phrases that convert well.

You should also build back links to various different pages – and not just your website’s homepage. The Search Engines like this – especially Google. A good example would be product group or category pages. It’s worth driving specific search terms to these pages – they often have links to lots of other product pages. Do not simply build links to your website’s home page. The SE’s are becoming increasingly interested in how a site’s individual pages are listed.

(C) Jay Kendall. Hop over to EvolveSEM.co.uk for superb advice on SEM Consultants and SEO Consultants.