Search Engine Optimisation

This is exactly what it says on the tin, optimising for search engines, which is different to optimising for the human reader, or conversion websites as we discuss elsewhere. The search engines are looking for different criteria to what the visitor will, and these continually changing set of rules are known as algorithms.

Now historically it was good enough to have a web page “littered” with keywords. So if you made chocolate bars you could “confuse” the robots and spiders by having a page that included “dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate etc.” and for the term chocolate you were likely to be at the top. Now people would search, be given the answer and visit and leave immediately.

So the algorithms have got smarter and the criteria have changed. The search engines are looking for well balanced and well presented pages. They will count the occurrences of words and score them appropriately. So our previous example scored badly with 50% of the words being chocolate. The engines are looking for someone talking in a sensible fashion, e.g. “Our chocolate is made for 87% cocoa butter…” etc.

Additionally the engines are mimicking “word of mouth” online. How often have you asked someone to recommend someone to perform a particular job, and the search engines are no different. They are looking to see how many people are willing to recommend your product or service, and also what weight they give to that person. So if you ask a random stranger to recommend a French restaurant they may give you an answer, but if you ask a restaurant critic you are more likely to take their answer. Google assigns each site a Page Rank and if you can get a high valued refer you get more kudos.

So just some of the processes we will help you with are
1. Have a Title for your page, shown at the top of your browser and as the top line of the Google result
2. Have a description tag, which says what the page does, show second on Google.
3. Have appropriate keywords that match the context of the page.
4. Build links, gather people who will refer you because you are an authority on you subject, product or service.

Now everyone will tell you that “Content is King” and we are no exception, but recommendations are the power behind the throne. If you want to test out this theory try searching on Google for the term “click here”

Now the top ranked site in Google is Adobe, not because they sell “click here” or is even a world authority on “click here”, but because they produced the portable data format or pdf files they almost everyone uses to transfer electronic documents. Sites that have a download will normally say “download our file ‘everything you ever wanted to know about beekeeping.pdf” you will need a pdf reader to view the file, if you don’t have it click here.

So your first steps on the journey are, write content people want to read, sign post it correctly and then get people to recommend it. Oh! And also launch the site properly so that you make it easy for the search engines to find you and crawl across the whole site.

We can assist you with all of these activities.

Contact us or request your copy of the Experts' Guide to Internet Marketing