Search Engine Optimisation – SEO: Let’s go back to the Basics

New to SEO?.. What’s all the fuss about?.. Let’s Break it Down

What is SEO, Exactly?

Essentially, the purpose of SEO is to:

• Provide a flawless, enjoyable user experience.
• Communicate to search engines the information you want them to see so they can drive traffic to your website and recommend it for relevant searches.

Basically, SEO isn’t just about making your site better and more accessible for people. It’s about building a website that is search-engine friendly too.

How do Search Engines Operate?

Search engines have two main objectives – crawling the web and building an index, and providing results by calculating the popularity and relevance of each for the user. Think of it as a directory, they use human editors to approve listings that are submitted to the – search engines use programs called spiders or robots to “crawl” the web to index the internet by following links to your website to gather data, and then return the results to the searcher. Search engines aim to carry out their job as best as possible by directing users to websites and content that is most relevant to them.

Presently, search engines generally interpret the importance of a website or content based on popularity – as in, the more popular a site or document is, the more valuable it is to the user. This assumption is based on the fact that search engines are continuing to increase users’ satisfaction by ranking content based on popularity.

Some of the Main Factors Search Engines Look For:

Links

One of the main factors search engines look at is our links, both to and from your website. Search engines look at the words you use within the links to determine the content of your site. Links from other websites to your website determine your “PageRank” which can be improved by building vast link structures to relevant websites. Google sees a link from Page A
to Page B as a vote from Page A for Page B. Votes cast by websites that are themselves important are more significant and assist in making other pages important. PageRank measures a web page’s importance – usually, pages with more links to them are more resourceful than pages that nobody links. This is because people are more likely to link to relevant content.

Keywords

The keywords you use have a major impact on search. Google suggests creating content primarily for users as this usually achieves positive results.

Avoid adding unnecessary amounts of keywords that are aimed at search engines but are senseless for users. It is important to create keyword-rich content based on what your users are searching for. Ask yourself – if you were searching for your own website, what keywords might you type in for each page? It is important to include keywords in titles, paragraphs and headings on each page. It is essential to optimize keyword usage on each webpage, placing the keywords early on in the title will be much more effective than having them in a domain or URL. However, it is critical to ensure you do not overdo it as a high keyword density will get your site penalised for keyword spam.

Content

It is essential to constantly provide new, useful and compelling content as this will encourage people to link to your website. Every year, Google updates its search algorithm hundreds and hundreds of times. What is a Search Algorithm? Most of these updates are minor, however, occasionally Google carries out major algorithmic updates (such as Google Penguin) that will affect search engines in significant ways. After the Google Penguin update (see here), regularly posting relevant and quality content is recommended as it will help to drive more traffic to your site. Search engines favour websites with frequently updated material containing relevant content. The benefit of this is, that if your website offers good content, then naturally other websites will want to link to you.

To Stand out Your Content Needs to Be

Other Things Search Engines Look For:

• User Experience – Is your page easy to navigate around? Does it look secure? What is the bounce rate?

• Site Speed – The latest research suggests that if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load, users are very likely to switch to another site. According to a Radware study, 51% of online shoppers in the US stated that if a site is too slow, they will not complete a purchase.

• Title Tag – Title tags simply tell users and search engines what the subject of your page is.

• Meta Description – Each page also needs a Meta description that tells search engines what the page is about.

• Heading Tags – These structure the pages for users and search engines to explain what the content is about.

Why Can’t Search Engines Find Me?

It is important to remember that web pages don’t always look the same to search engines as they do you and I.

Write in a format search engines understand:

It is crucial that your most important content is in HTML text format in order to be listed in search engine results. Search engines often cannot find and usually ignore Flash files, Java applets, images and other non-text content.

Crawlable Link Structures

It is vital that your web pages have “crawlable link structures“ in order to let the spiders browse the pathways of your website and find all the pages. If you imagine the web as a network of stops in a big subway system – each stop is a unique web page or file. Search engines use links to crawl the entire subway system, finding all stops along the way. If you structure your page navigation in ways that are not accessible to search engines, you will affect your ability to be listed in search engines’ results.

How Does this Happen?

In the illustration shown, Google’s spider reaches page “A” and can see links to pages “B” and “E”. However, as there are no crawlable or direct links to pages “C” and “D”, the spider has no way to reach them and may not even know they exist.

• Links Written in Javascript:
  If you use Javascript to write links, there is a very good chance that search spiders will not crawl to the links embedded within. HTML links should be used to replace Javascript on any web pages you’d like spiders to access. Rich media, like Javascript, may hide links from spiders which will restrict those pages from being indexed in the search engine results.
• Too many links:
  Search engines only crawl a certain amount of links per page. Pages that contain hundreds of links risk the possibility that all of those links may not be crawled, therefore, they will not appear when a user makes a search making them essentially invisible.

To Sum It Up

Investing in SEO is more important now than ever. If your business wants to succeed in online marketing, it needs to have an SEO strategy set up as it currently remains one of the most important elements of any business’s online efforts and presence. Without SEO, you risk losing out on top Google rankings which will prevent you from fully maximising revenue opportunities.