Search engine optimization explained

We often get enquiries from people who already have a web site and want it to perform better on the search engines. To help people understand it better we have written this guide. We hope it helps you and would be pleased to hear any feedback, if you have found it useful or even if you just disagree with what we are saying, please let us know: info@methodandclass.com

A brief overview of how we interpret the search engines to work

You have to consider that SEO is not one single thing, it's the sum result of lots of influencing factors - which we aim to explain in this guide.

Contrary to what some SEO companies will have you believe, no-one knows for sure how the major search engines actually work. The algorithms they use are closely guarded secrets and organic - they change regularly. To this end, anyone who says they know how to 'guarantee you are number one on Google' is optimistic at best.

What we do know is that there are a number of things we can do to your web site to ensure it performs better on the search engines.

How your site is indexed for keywords

 

Lets consider how a search engine decides which keywords (search terms) are related to your site and also how important your site is for that keyword compared to rival web sites.

Once the search engines know where your web site is, either by submitting your URL (definition of URL) to them or by following a link from another web site, the search engine companies have sophisticated software that scans your web sites content. These bits of software are often called 'search engine spiders' or 'search engine crawlers'.

The key factors that influence your position in the results returned for a particular keyword are;

1. The content of the web site

The content of your web site has a massive contribution to the performance on the search engines. The main reasons are;

• The text used on the page will be scanned by the search engine spider and the 'keyword count' recorded for each page - so if you have prominent use of the words 'cheap tyres' they will be noted as being a key word for your site.
• If the content is found interesting or useful other web sites will link to it, which will help increase your popularity and boost your position in the search results.

So it is worthwhile having content that is both well written and web specific. Hopefully, it will then perform well in the search engine results and also encourage other web sites to link to you.

Some excellent ways of increasing content that will cover both of these things is to write white papers, case studies and testimonials. You can use these pages to load up on the required keywords and also present information that other sites do not offer.

2. Optimization of the code

Above we discussed the content of the web site. Well it doesn't end there. The content and the code that displays the content must be optimized for search engines as well.

Web pages are programmed in a language called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) (find out more here). This is basically a series of tags that look something like this . All web pages will have hundreds of these tags in order to format how the content (text and images) are displayed on the page. There are some key tags that need to be completed correctly to help your site be suitably indexed by the search engine crawlers. A lazy web developer will not complete all of these tags and ultimately hinder your sites performance on the search engines.

The major tags that we should consider are;

• Page titles - this is used to explain what the web page is about.
• Meta tags - these are not as important as they once were, because amateur web developers commonly abuse them. But the Keywords for the page can be listed here, along with a description of the page.
• Header tags, h1, h3, h3 - The search engines like to see a well formatted web page, that is coded a bit like a newspaper page - so you have the main headings at the top of the page (the h1 tag is the header 1) and then the sub headings underneath (h3, h3) and the relevant content. It is important that the keyword(s) you have identified for each page are used in these header tags.
• Links - all links should have the title completed, which explains where the link is heading. Not only is this good practice for search engines, but also for W3C validation and SAP78 compliance (read more about this here)
• Images - All images used in the web site should have their alternative attributes set. Again, this is good practice for search engines and vital for W3C, SAP 78 compliance and being within the Disability Discrimintaion Law (read more about this here).

There are some other coding practices that we can implement to improve the performance of your web site on the search engines, they are important but complicated and detailing how they work is outside the scope of this document.

3. Links to your web site

The number of links from other web sites to your web site is one of the single most important things influencing your position on the search engines.

Consider this example showing a comparison of some tyre resellers web sites.

Domain name	Page rank	Back links
www.mytyres.co.uk	6	38
www.blackcircles.com	5	45
www.ctyres.co.uk	4	28
www.rubberball.co.uk	3	5

The PR refers to the Google Page Rank and the 'Back Links' is the number of links from other web sites to yours (Google is reported to only considers links with a page rank of 4+) It is not simply a case of getting as many links to your site as possible - there are other influencing factors on these links that need to be considered as well;

• The topic of the web site / web page that is linking to you
• The text used in the link
• The page rank or popularity of the linking page
• Where the page links to on your site
• How many links are already on the page that links to you

Quality of links

If you look at the results for the top two examples, My Tyres and Black Circles, you will see that even though Black Circles have more back links, My Tyres has a better Page Rank. This is because the links to My Tyres are from either higher ranking pages or pages with fewer other external links on the page. This demonstrates the need to obtain quality back links, not just getting a link from any web site, regardless of subject matter and Page Rank. It is commonly believed that 10 good links from high Page Rank sites would out perform 50 links from poor Page Rank sites.

Building good quality links to your web site is a very time consuming job and one that often involves lots of emails, phone calls and chase ups. To put into perspective, we have decided to charge on a sliding scale for obtaining these links. If we charge by the hour, the bills would quickly become un-economical.

We have decided to charge for obtaining back links based on the popularity and importance of the linking site and also if the site is local or national. Obtaining local links to a web site is always far more difficult than obtaining national or international links, so therefore we charge more for them.

4. Other factors

There are a number of other factors that will influence how well your web site performs on the search engines. The algorithms used are complicated enough to factor in things like;

• The age of the web site - when was it first registered
• How long it is registered for; 1year, 2years or 10 years?
• The Keywords used in the domain name
• Keywords used in page names and folders
• Are the URL'S clean?

5. General Notes

As mentioned at the beginning of this guide, you have to consider search engine optimisation as the sum of all of the above factors. There are no hard and fast ways of reaching the top spot and any changes you make to a web site will take a few weeks or months to influence the listing results.

One thing that should also be mentioned is the 'Sandbox effect' - where basically any new domain names can take 6 - 9 months to start getting indexed properly by Google - something that should not be overlooked. Under these circumstances it is recommended that a pay-per-click service be used as an intrim way of securing targeted traffic.

Some useful sites on the subject

• Search Engine Glossary - need an explanation of the buzzword?
• SEO Chat - more information than you will ever need..
• Search Engine Watch - another site dedicated to the subject

Now you know what is involved.. do you still want to do it yourself?

As mentioned above, these things change regularly so we will endeavour to maintain this article and keep it up to date for you... alternatively give us a call for the most up-to-date information.

We hope you have found this guide useful, if you want to have a chat about it call us, email us or Skype us on the following:

• Telephone: 01908 565755
• email: info@methodandclass.com
• Skype: methodclass