The other day I overheard a conversation / ongoing argument between two colleagues. One said that the reason our websites climbed up a few notches in Google for the competitive keywords Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation was entirely down to our new venture in Video Blogs the other said it was due to the internal architecture of the sites being improved.

I can’t help believing that the reason our sites have climbed the rankings is for both these reasons, and a few more besides.

I started to think that Search Engine Optimisation is a little like making an elaborate cake where the ingredients keep changing and improving to make the recipe richer and the cake better.

There is no one answer to achieving good results in SEO. There are many different ‘ingredients’ to consider.

Good Keyword Research

Keyword research can be a tricky one. Often the keywords that you may consider to be the best are not the ones your customers’ would use to search for your site. There are many tools that help you choose keywords; Wordtracker and Google Adwords Keyword Tool are some of the better ones available.

Once you have a list of keywords you should do a KOI (Keyword Opportunity Index) report. This should give you a list of keywords that have low competition but high search volume.

Internal Architecture

I like to think of the internal architecture of a site as being like the foundations
of a house. You can build a house with shaky foundations but sooner or later
it’s going to start falling down. The same applies to websites.

If you build your site with the search engines in mind by making it easier for them to do their job: crawling, and then indexing the content. You’re closer to achieving a lasting presence in the search engines results.

Regular Interactive Content such as Videos and Audio

Regular interactive content helps with SEO because it can increase the ‘time on site’. This indicates to Google (and other Search Engines) that your site is a useful resource, and that people stay there once they visit it. Also Google indexes audio content now.

By placing videos on YouTube you can get more traffic to your site and increase the exposure of your videos.

We have also started to supply a transcribed version of our videos. This is for two reasons; one for accessibility so that deaf and hard of hearing people can still enjoy the content, and for Google to index the relevant content.

Have a Blog with Regular New Content

Blogs are an excellent tool for SEO. They provide regular new content (if updated! Note: Update your blog!) for Google to index. The real benefit of having a blog is to tell your customers and potential customers about your company and your products. You can quickly become an ‘expert’ in your field by regularly providing new content that is both informative and written with your keywords in mind.

Social Media

Ah, Social Media! This could be a blog post in itself; it’s such a massive subject! Social Media is a useful marketing tool to promote your business. With so many people now relying on Social Media to connect with others you’d be a fool to ignore it.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon can create a vast number of links and visitors to your site.

Link Building Through Directories

Though directories are less important than they once were, industry specific directories can be really useful for getting relevant links. Be careful about the ‘neighbourhood’ of your chosen directory and you should be fine.

Link Building Through Asking Begging for Links from other Webmasters

This is my least favourite aspect of SEO. I must have written hundreds of emails to webmasters with the hope that they will add my link to their site, only for the request to be turned down, or, more usually, ignored. But, for the few that say ‘yes’ this can be a really valuable exercise for link building. Sometimes you get lucky.

I often bypass UK companies on this and concentrate on overseas sites where you are unlikely to be in direct competition with the site you are targeting. This will still give you a relevant link.

Blog Commenting

This is a bit of a grey area. Some SEOs consider blog commenting to be a form of spam. And it certainly has been abused so much so that the majority of ‘blog comment’ links are ‘nofollow’ links and almost entirely useless. However, I do believe that by reading and engaging with others within your field you can quickly become an ‘expert’. By writing well-informed and interesting comments about the post your link may be clicked on by a fellow reader. Reading blogs and keeping abreast of your industry is an excellent way of learning more about your industry.

Article Marketing

Article Marketing is a great way of getting keyword rich links within relevant content. Articles are distributed across the Internet via article sites. The content is also indexed quickly, giving faster results.

Press Releases

Press releases are an excellent way of gaining interest in your product or service. By writing them with your keywords in mind and placing keyword rich links within the copy you can get results quickly.

There is also the possibility that they may be picked up by the Press thus gaining you even more exposure.

Content Writing with SEO in Mind

Content that is both well written and full of keywords can be a difficult thing to achieve, but it is extremely important for SEO as well as conversion. Take time over your content it could be one of the most valuable things on your site.

So, there you go, one of these ‘ingredients’ alone won’t make your site go page one, number one, but a combination of some, or ideally, all of these will help your site achieve high listings.

It is important if you plan to implement, or already have a Search Engine Optimisation campaign that you understand how the search engines work. I’m not telling you to hire a mathematician to try and figure out algorithms – that’d be a bit of a waste of time as the algorithms change so frequently. But there are some basic facts that I think, even if you know them already,I still think its important to revisit and think about.

The search engines have some crucial operations that let them provide useful and relevant web results when their users try to find information, services or products by using their search engine.

Crawling the World Wide Web

Search engines run automated programs, called ‘robots’ (sometimes shortened to ‘bots’) or ‘spiders’ that use hyperlinks to ‘crawl’ the pages and documents that make up the web. It is impossible to work out exactly how many web pages there are but it’s somewhere around 20 billion according to some estimates, search engines have probably crawled just under half of these.

Indexing pages and documents

Once a page has been crawled the content it displays can then be “indexed”. Indexing is basically a giant database that stores all the documents that make up the search engine’s ‘index’. This index must be managed so that the search engine can search and sort through billions of documents in fractions of a second.

Processing Queries

When a user types a search query into the search engine, the search engine can retrieve this information from it’s index all the documents that match that query. The search engines determine the match by checking if the terms or phrases used for the query are in the document. This is why keywords are important, and the placement of keywords is even more important.

Ranking the Results

After the search engine has found which results are a match for the query, the search engine’s algorithm runs calculations on each result to find the most relevant for the query. The most relevant web page will be placed at the top, and it will run down from there. This way, users can choose the site they want to visit first.

Needless to say, this all happens in no time at all – type a search query and the search engine will come back with the results almost instantly. That’s pretty impressive, in my opinion!

The most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo! And MSN) have some of the most complex systems for finding results. Their algorithms are closely guarded secrets, that constantly change and get developed.

By taking this information and using it to your advantage, you can see that the most important thing is to get your content right. This is what the search engines’ ‘read’ in order to index your site and then use to determine your search placement. By using the keywords that your target audience would use to find your services you can gain the types of traffic required to convert users into buyers. You may want to read Content Creation for seo purposes to get some useful starting points for writing your copy.

For best results in SEO you must start with a cleanly coded website. The search engine spiders will find it easier to crawl and index your site if the code is clean.

There are other benefits of validating your code, these include:

• Cross browser compatibility
• Increased accessibility
• Faster loading times

You will probably find your site will start to climb the rankings once you ensure the site complies with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) web standards. It is important to check each page validates, and every new page you add to your website should be checked.

Validate your code

Use the W3C HTML validator to check your HTML code. The vaildator will give you prompts to help you fix any bugs it finds.

Use the W3C CSS validator to check your CSS. Again, the validator will help you fix any problems it finds.

By making sure your site validates for both HTML and CSS you are ‘future-proofing’ your site, ensuring long term success.

A key aspect of proper SEO is keyword placement. It is important to remember it isn’t just about the quantity of keywords. In fact, you can get penalised if you over-do the keywords. It can also look unnatural for the reader, and you must make your reader feel as though they are in the right place at all times to ensure your site actually does what you want it to do: get sales, enquiries etc.

Many people believe that if they fill their web pages with keywords then they will ‘get to the top of Google’ – this simply isn’t true. You should ensure your keywords are placed in the correct HTML tags.

Use these guidelines to optimise your page:

• Place your keywords in the Title tag, Meta Description tag, Meta Keyword tag, and if applicable in the Alt tags.
• Place your keywords inside one h1 tag,  h2 tag and h3 tag.
• Ensure your keywords are in the first paragraph of the page – ideally this should be in the first 25 words.
• Place your keywords at the end of the page – ideally in the last 25 words.
• Make sure your keywords are in strong (bold) tags at least once on the page.
• Italicise your keywords at least once on the page.
• Put your keywords in lists.

By following these simple guidelines your site should not only read better than a page stuffed with keywords (and therefore be better at converting a browser into a customer) you are far more likely to get high rankings.

After an intensive training programme into internal and external search engine optimisation, research led me to the question that continues to intrigue SEO consultants, when is it viable to include a “pay per click” campaign into a failing organic site? In many ways it would be quite easy to spend customers money to achieve this goal.  However, there lies the quandary, is PPC the best way to improve traffic ratings or is it just a ‘quick fix’ or ‘patch’ to failing ‘Organic’ campaign?
I have recently read reports from various resources that inform potential on-line businesses the ‘Opportunity’ of using “pay per click” services provided by many search engines and directories such as Google and Yahoo. They guarantee to achieve the highest desired position on the front pages of many of the major search engines. Many might say ‘a lively marketplace, the higher you bid, the higher your advertisement will be displayed in the list’. There lies another important question at what cost is this achievable and who truly benefits from this route, is it the customer, or is the providers, or is the ‘cake’ big enough for all. I do believe that the way forward for SEO will be a combination of both ‘PPC’ and ‘Organic’ routes as long as the campaign has solid foundations with sound SEO basics.