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Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the Holy Grail of online marketing – seemingly unlimited targeted traffic and all for FREE! Unfortunately, it is not as simple as this in the ‘smoke and mirrors world’ of SEO.
There are some simple stages in working towards a web site that is search engine friendly, but the first one should be to work out whether SEO is for you in the first place.
Remember:
  • SEO is a relative sport and as such you need to look at your competitors and market sector in order to ascertain the likely route ahead.
  • If you are unfortunate enough to inhabit a space online that is full of 10,000 page websites that have been around for years and are linked to by every university in the UK, then SEO should be considered as a long term goal and definitely not a primary source of traffic - unless there is a niche space you can find with some decent traffic and a high conversion.
    • However, there are a number of simple stages that must be addressed in any SEO plan – simply find out where you are on the following list and start from there:
    1. Technical site optimisation – remove dynamic urls, page specific meta tags, w3c compliant, off page CSS.
    2. Spider facilitation – can spiders find all deep content pages from the home page? Avoid JavaScript, compulsory cookies and any links that can’t be followed by search engine spiders plus include a site map in the global navigation for good measure.
    3. Spider visits – ensure your site has regular search engine spider visits by being linked to from high authority sites in your sector and that content is updated on a regular basis to keep them coming back.
    4. Content – audit the content on the site against keywords that are important to your business and develop a plan for bridging the gaps. Content should be relevant, unique and fresh with a density of keywords that makes for natural reading.
    5. Link building – Its is especially important for Google that you have links from relevant ‘authority’ sites coming into the web site. Use ‘link:www.yoursite.com’ in Google to find out which sites are linking to you.
    Before you start on any of the above, take a range of the most important keyphrases relating to your web site (use the free application available at www.goodkeywords.com) and check for you current positions in Google, MSN and Yahoo. This can then be repeated after initial work has been carried out giving an indication about whether each activity should be extended or rejected.

    Finally, a warning not to cross over to the ‘dark side’ of SEO. Avoid the following techniques considered as spam by the search engines: Cloaking, doorway (marketing) pages, hidden text, keyword stuffing and invisible image tags. This is not an exhaustive list, but the best rule of thumb is that if you wouldn’t do it naturally then don’t do it for SEO.