What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation (SEO), also called Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of online marketing. Its function is to make a website and its content highly relevant to both search engines and to users. Its aim is to help a site gain a high ranking in the search results for the targeted keywords and phrases.
Is it important?
The majority of visitors to a website will come via a search engine. There are currently estimated to be around 20 billion web pages, with the search engines having found and "crawled" around 8 to 10 billion of them! Searchers generally will only look at the first couple of pages of search results and so to maximise the traffic coming to a website it is important to gain the highest ranking possible in the search results.
How does SEO work?
For background information see how search engines work.
Make sure search engines can crawl the website
The first step is make sure that the search engines are able to "crawl" a website. This means :-
- Do not use frames
- Only using tables to show tabular data and not to layout web pages
- Do not use links which are dynamically constructed through JavaScript
- Use Flash carefully to ensure that search engines can follow all the navigation and links
- Use session IDs and DHTML carefully.
Target keywords and phrases
In order to target a specific set of search terms it is important to understand how the target audience approaches searching. What keywords do they use on search engines? Which search engines do they use? Keywords can also be derived by checking the website statistics to see which search terms are currently bringing visitors to the website and analysis of competitors websites.
Once a list of potential keywords and phrases is obtained then they must be narrowed down to the ones that the website has the most chance of being successful with. It would be very difficult to compete on the keyword "books" but it may be easier to compete on the more specific phrase "out of print books".
The next step is to write the content of the website trying to use the selected keywords as often as possible whilst keeping the text natural and readable for human visitors. The most important areas of the content are the page title, headings and approximately the first 30 or so words of text on the page. In addition it is desirable to use the keywords wherever possible. For instance instead of a navigation item "Second hand" it would be better to use "Second hand books".
Ensure relevancy
The content must be checked for relevancy. One of the factors in the search results page ranking for a website is relevancy for a given search term, if the website is about "books" then having content on other subjects will lower the relevancy of the site overall.
Staying out of trouble
Be very careful about using so called "Black hat" SEO techniques as these can get you banned from the search engine results completely.
Some of the current practises that can get you banned include :-
- Presenting different content to search engines than is displayed to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking".
- Over filling a page with keywords (known as "keyword stuffing") in an attempt to gain a higher page ranking. Pages should be written first and foremost for human visitors and not for search engines.
- Hiding text or links by using the same coloured text as background, text with a font size of 0, text behind an image or text hidden with CSS styling. Techniques such as this make a website appear to be untrustworthy because these techniques can be used to hide keywords from human users and provide links that are only meant for the search engines to follow.
- Participating in link exchanges and link farms. Theses are websites that set up automatic link exchanges to increase participants link popularity. The links are usually hidden from human visitors through the use of CSS, and either making the text the same color as the background, or by putting the links in an invisible layer.