Search engine optimisation (SEO) is what you do to improve the visibility of your website (or individual pages) so that search engines direct people to you via their “natural” or un-paid results pages. You can also pay to advertise at the top of search results (sometimes a good idea, sometimes not). Crudely speaking, the higher up your site is on a relevant Google search result, the better ‘optimised’ your site. Google dominates US and European search at present, but there are other significant Search Engines to consider too. Like Yahoo, and Bing.

To be really successful, you need to do a combination of things that make your site more prominent with the search engines. A good name for your site helps people search for you directly – the shorter, the better. This is more for signaling your brand message, and being memorable to your customers than anything else. Search engines pick up on other things. Technically, your site could be called bears.com and be about cats, and to Google, this wouldn’t matter too much. But it would be counter-intuitive for your target audience, who might want to search for you directly, but can’t quite remember your brand name.

Relevance & Language

So the more relevant your website’s content is to your target audience(s), the more ‘optimised’ your site becomes. Content is king. Think like a magazine editor, and design with a sense of purpose. Give your readers something of value. You need to understand exactly who you are targeting. How will they perceive you, and how will they behave when searching? Design accordingly. Part of this involves identifying ‘Keywords’ that you will use in your content to be flagged up as relevant to a search query.

Your site’s headlines are the most important place to use the best Keywords. SEO is based on human behavioral science, so use exactly the same techniques that an editor will use to sell magazines.  People usually search with very simple language – but sometimes they can make a very specific request. You need to have a long think about the language you are going to use on every page of your site, as it needs to reflect the language of your target audience. Identify the most important terms relating to the subject, and emphasise them in your content.

Research, Research, Research

The more you know about the common language that bridges you with your audience, the better. Research which Keywords your most successful competitors are using. Research how often particular search terms are used. Google’s Search Term Usage Statistics are available for free (some astonishing stats!). You should study this data in depth, as it is rocket fuel for your web traffic if used properly. It will more than likely tell you things about your target audience that you never knew before! SEO involves tailoring and building your site’s content (and therefore Keywords) to cover the most popular search requests relating to you/your subject. You can’t cover them all, so be selective, and base your decisions on your research findings. There are always opportunities to think laterally with headlines, content, and keywords and this can bring alsorts of surprising success. Your research will help you do this, inspired and informed by trying out alternative search queries as a major part of your research.

You cannot stuff your pages with repeated Keywords and expect Google to take you seriously (unless your content justifies it). This kind of laziness does not work.

Sometimes even ‘stupid’ search terms are better than ‘clever’ ones. You need to think like your target audience do, in order for them to find you. Use the data from Google. Some of your audience may be stupid, some highly intelligent – you may, or may not be able to optimise for both. There are alsorts of audiences out there; male/female, foreign/domestic, expert/amateur, young/old, and so on. Decide which ones are more important, and design your content and language accordingly.

Find Your Niche

Some search terms are more saturated (and competitive) than others. Like “insurance”. So you need to pick your battles. If you want to find a way to stand out from crowd, try creating a unique message.

Make your content more valuable by not trying to be all-things to all-people. Publishing niche content allows you to cover important specific interests. More specialist content also equals more ‘Web Presence’, and this hugely increases the chance that you will catch browsers coming from different places (metaphorically, and physically). Like a good library, you can offer a range of specialist content on any single subject. Or lots of pages/articles, on lots of subjects – but you will find it harder to stand out. You need to decide how to balance breadth of content, with depth. And you need to be realistic about how much content you can create for your website. Many people try to do too much, or fantasise about how productive their writing schedule will be. Don’t get carried away, as creating good content is time intensive. Start by being very good at one thing, and build your site up from there. Look for content online that you can borrow from – like relevant Youtube videos, or information from Wikipedia, BBC, etc, etc.

Being Better Organised

Successful SEO involves considering how search engines work as well as what people search for. This is where good ‘back-end’ design gets you up the rankings. The way in which your content is ‘Indexed’ or structured is also very important. A good web design will involve very good indexing, just as a good library will be intelligently organised. If you have a good ‘Content Management System’ – like WordPress, much of this work can be automatically done for you (if set up properly). You want good indexing to be automated.

Relevant content will help the indexing. In addition, you can edit the HTML and associated coding on each page to increase the relevance to specific keywords, and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Again, a good ‘Content Management System’ (CMS) helps you enormously. WordPress makes this process very easy, with many good ‘Plugins’ that enhance your SEO. When you are writing or editing a page, you will be able to play with ‘keywords’, ‘tags’, titles, ‘categories’ and ‘descriptions’ as a website administrator. These all get noticed first by the search engines, which then go on to scan the main content of your page.

The Power of Testimonials

Promoting your site with backlinks (referral links from other sites) is another very important SEO tactic. To do this well, you want to make friends with people who can send you traffic directly from their site, and increase your weighting on search engine results. A referral link is a testimonial saying that your site is good. Just like someone recommending a good tradesman at a time of need – chances are you would value their advice. So Google accounts for this when scanning web pages. Bloggers generate referral links all the time. Then there’s members of the wider public linking to you – on Forums, on Facebook, and in the comments section on News Sites, Blogs, and so on.

To an extent,  you have control over who is linking to you – at first, maybe. Here, consider both the quantity, and quality of testimonials. While you could set up 100 referral links on irrelevant sites to make you look popular, don’t. Weak referrals can discredit your site. Google is smart enough to discount the value of such referrals. We have all come across websites that clog up the Internet with useless links, and junk information, and they are a big waste of time. Search engines are looking for a relationship between you and the referral site, to see if it a trustworthy testimonial. The content, and the popularity of the referring site is being assessed, weighting the value of the link. Try to get referral links on sites that lend credibility to your site – that relate to it in some way – like a journalist’s article, discussing the same subject as you. Or a blog. Forums and Social Networks perfect for generating discussions about your site, and here you can build up credibility from Internet users very quickly. Google accounts for the value in any testimonial, and your stock goes up the more people appear to like your content and refer to it.

The Network Effect

Consider how Social Networking (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, LinkedIn, Buzz, etc) can connect millions of people with your website. If you do something that people love, they will share your link on sites like Facebook with hundreds of their friends. They might even set up a fan group, and thousands of new people can instantly be exposed to your offering. Momentum, and multiple referrals can build up very quickly. And now we are into a whole new realm of PR potential.

Profit From SEO

If you have the time, or the staff, you can do all your SEO in-house, using the techniques discussed here. Start straight away when you have a new website. But there is so much you can do, and if your business depends on high quality web traffic, you are well worth investing some serious time and resources in a sophisticated, ongoing SEO strategy.

There is now a growing army of full-time “search engine optimisers,” or consultants who will improve your rankings on Google for you. Or, you could get a savvy person to work on it on a more casual basis, but there will be limits to what a semi-pro can do. Consider how important web traffic is to you.

Two things that a consultancy can do are: generate new content (stimulate online discussions, lobby journalists & bloggers to mention you in articles, etc), and create new content, either on your site, or external content referring people to your site or brand. They might make a funny video for you, and post it on Youtube. It goes ‘Viral’ if word of this video (or article, etc) gets pumped out on social bookmarking sites (like Redit, Digg), on social networks (Facebook, etc), on Blogs, on Review Sites (Trip Advisor, Amazon), on Forums, on Wikipedia, on News Sites, and so forth.

Celebrities and major brands face a daily struggle to stay in the limelight. So they pay PR firms to promote positive online content, and to get positive new things written about them. They employ teams of bloggers to bolster this with propaganda, disguised as content created by happy, independent fans. The intention is to move positive content up the search engine rankings, and negative content  down.

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