Andrew Jones’ Blog

You’ve now done most of the site set-up, and it’s time to start tuning…

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of tuning your web page(s) and links to help improve your page position in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).This is important because when people are searching for something they often only click through to the first few results. The first page, above the ‘fold’ (i.e. what shows immediately, without having to scroll down) is the prime real estate in the world of SERPs. Below the fold, but still on the first page is good too. Then as you get further down, your chance of click through, or Click Through Rate diminishes rapidly.

So what can you do to improve your SERPs position? Several things:

1. Optimise for ‘long tail’ keyword searches, rather than just a single word – as the ‘big boys’ will have huge budgets for popular single word searches, so you won’t be able to compete. Also, generally speaking, people using several words to zero in on a more specific target are more likely to be in a buying frame of mind.
2. Optimise your page(s) to be search engine (crawler/robot) friendly, by helping them load quickly, having the right keywords in the right approximate density, having other necessary components such as terms and conditions, privacy policy as appropriate to improve your page ranking.
3. Have a good structure to your website, linking between pages in the right ways.
4. Get links TO your page(s) ‘backlinks’ – preferably from good, established sites. These may be blogs and article sites – helping to drive more traffic directly as well as improving your SERP position.

Points 1 to 3 are ‘on-page’ optimisation, point 4 is ‘off-page’ optimisation.

Do your on-page optimisation first, then the off-page. Do not use spamming type optimisation, as Google will penalise you for it. e.g. keyword spamming is using artificially high density of the relevant keywords on your page – whether visible or not, i.e. don’t colour keyword text to make it invisible, don’t repeat words in meta tags, titles, images’ alt text etc. to try and artificially increase the keyword density – it won’t help and will probably get flagged as keyword spamming, then you get penalised for it. Keep the keyword density natural, e.g. once in the title(s) and perhaps two or three times in a long paragraph. It should read naturally, and be well written – not that it has to be award winning or anything, but you should make it as informative and interesting as you can, in the time you allot to writing it. So don’t over use keywords, but do use them! Use them in the title, meta tags, image alt text, and the Anchor text for your links from other pages (see backlinks below)

Backlinks: one-way links (to your site) rank higher than reciprocal/2-way links – where you might arrange to have your site link on their page in return for putting their site link on your page. Also take into account the anchor (visible) text for the link to your page, and the (Google) page rank of the originating page. The anchor text you provide for your link will rank better if it contains your keywords. The Anchor text for your links is rated highly, especially from highly rated originating pages. The page rank of the originating site can be seen if you have the Google toolbar – a higher page rank is better. Also the originating site should also be relevant to the subject – i.e. your keyword subject. A link from a gardening site to an online pet supplies site won’t rank as highly as a link from a pet owners related site (all other factors being equal)

Be careful of building your links too quickly, as Google may penalise you if they think your links are not genuine – i.e. added purely for SEO purposes… to ‘stay under the radar’ keep it to between 5 and 10 added per day (remember that someone else may also add links spontaneously though, so don’t add 10 every single day!)

There are different ways to get backlinks:

• add them yourself, or outsource (pay someone), by posting reviews or articles to blogs or article sites.
• submit a press release about some event related to your site (search on “submit press release” to find where to submit this) – you’ll need to write the press release first! And make it interesting.
• arrange for reciprocal links with relevant good sites (do a search and check out the top sites from the results)
• buy links or pay a service to buy them for you (link building service, link directories, links networks).