Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process by which you optimise your web pages so that they appears high in the natural search results (aka SERPs) for the terms that you’d like visitors to find you using. These will typically include things like your company name, the names of the products you sell, or the service you provide. The aim of SEO is to improve the volume of targeted traffic your site receives.

SEO is distinct from the other widely known search marketing technique of Pay per Click (PPC) advertising in that the resulting traffic is delivered without cost to the web site as the traffic comes from the search engines natural results. This makes SEO a very appealing choice for marketers as, although it’s a great deal harder to deliver than running a PPC program, the profitability is outstanding, making it well worth the effort.

Optimising sites for SEO primarily involves editing the content, html, and coding methods to make it as easy as possible for search engines to find the content, and to ensure that the content is highly relevant to the specific keywords searched for. But before we dive in and start changing the web site it’s time to stand back a little and consider where the best place to start is.

All too often people rush into SEO campaigns with only the most rudimentary idea of what they hope to achieve by it. The answer here is usually “more visitors” or something similar, but if you want to have a successful SEO project you need to start before you go anywhere near the web site.

You need to create a list of keywords that you believe will provide you with the sort of visitors that you’d like to visit your site. Spend time doing this and do as much research as you can to validate your choices. Some questions when considering your choices might be:

• Is this keyword phrase relevant to my customers?
  (you might have a great keyword, but if it’s not relevant to your content the new visitors will leave as quickly as they arrived)

• Is this keyword phrase very competitive?
  (if you’re thinking of a term like “credit cards” you might want to try something more specific as this is a hugely competitive term)

• Is this keyword phrase popular?
  (there are lots of tools out there that will give you good indications as to how many searches keywords phrases receive)

Asking these kinds of questions should start to focus you in on the best keywords to use for your web site. For your first attempt at SEO try to keep to a manageable number, probably 10 or so keyword phrases would be a nice starting point, and if you drew up an original list of about 100, this should really focus your research.

Web Site Structure

Effective SEO uses the structure of your web sites files to aid the cause also. Professional advice would be useful here if you can afford it as tweaks can be made here that are dependent on the technology being used. Alternatively do some further research for how SEO can be applied to any technology you may use.

Something you can do here though that is universal is in creating your folders and file names in a way that is of benefit while not deterring from the usability of the site. To explain, you may sell “Sexy Widgets” from page like this:

www.widget-world.com/products/product_123.html

Of course, that URL is perfectly valid and technically fine. However, by making some adjustments this might be changed to something more useful like this:

www.widget-world.com/widgets/sexy-widget.html

The change to a more descriptive file name and file folder is clearly beneficial to both the search engines and your users. This is of course a simplification to demonstrate the point, but there is often some degree of tweaking that can be done to improve the naming policies used when creating new content so even if it’s hard to change what you currently have, a new policy for future content additions might be a wise move.

Creating a page that optimises for the targeted keyword phrase should not be overly difficult. There are rules to follow (covered in many other articles) but providing they’re adhered to, creating the optimum level of keyword density should be relatively easy. If it isn’t, it’s time to stand back from the coal face again and consider whether you’re optimising the right keyword for the content being used.

When optimising content you should have in your mind a quick check list of page elements to consider. This will include things like title tags, meta data, anchor text in links, use of h1,2, 3 tags and density of keyword placement. Once you’ve worked through your mental list go over them again to make sure you’ve done all you can in each area and that it’s consistent.

Finally, take a short break, come back with a nice cup of coffee, forget all about SEO techniques and wizardry and read the content you’ve been working on, imagining you’ve just arrived at it from the search engine. Does it still make sense to you as a customer? Is the content engaging and interesting? If it doesn’t draw you in and, importantly if it doesn’t read like naturally formed content you’ll need to take another look at it.

Don’t lose focus of what this is all for. If you’re getting lots of highly relevant traffic pouring in to your site only to lose them immediately to an unreadable page of uninteresting content that’s probably worse than doing nothing.

And Finally

Once all that’s done, congratulations, you’ve reached the beginning again. Much like a new puppy, SEO isn’t just for Christmas, it’s for life. Getting good placement for the keywords you want on the search engine results pages is a highly competitive business and you need to constantly nurture and protect your investment.

Hopefully that’s served as a nice introduction to what SEO is about in its most basic terms. There’s much more to get your teeth into once you start to pick up some more experience and knowledge along the way. Good luck for now and I’ll see you again for some more in depth dips into the mysterious waters of SEO in the future.