What does SEO involve?

SEO is an ongoing process of updating, monitoring and developing a website. There are a number of factors that affect where a website appears in the search results on the search engines.

There is no one set of rules that will ensure a website will achieve a high position in search results, in fact the search engines themselves don’t publicise their exact rules for how websites are ranked (known as Algorithms), which are something they all keep very close to their chests.

So how do we know what needs to be done to improve your rankings? A combination of research, published articles and experience of SEO give us an insight in to the ‘best practice’ for optimising websites and improving their rankings.

The key factor for all SEO is ‘relevance’. This being the relevance of a website in relation to the search term entered – the more relevant a search engine deems a website, the higher it will appear on search results.

So making your website as relevant for the search terms you wish to be found on are the foundations of SEO.

Some of the factors that will positively affect your websites’ relevance are:

• Content: The written content is the most important part of any web page. The content must contain information relevant to the products or services that you wish to be ranked on. The copy on a web page should contain relevant, succinct references to your search terms, as well as ensuring that the prominence of your key search terms is high and the wording is such that key phrases are not repeated too often – this is known as keyword ‘density’ which basically means making sure that key phrases aren’t over-used in relation to the amount of content on the page.
• Links: Making sure that there are clear, relevant links within the pages of a website. Proper usage of links within your website, and to external websites, will ensure it is clear to the search engines what you’re page is talking about.
• Title Optimisation: Every web page has a title to describe the page and the information it contains. Page titles should be as relevant to the page content as possible and describe what’s on the page as clearly and succinctly as possible. For example, the page title on the website below is ‘City Breaks – Short Break Holidays – Weekend Breaks’
• Hidden page elements: Behind each web page are some hidden page elements, known as Meta tags, which describe the content and nature of the web page. These should be as relevant to the individual page as possible (rather than using the same meta tags on all of your web pages). These are important as search engines will refer to the meta tags to determine the content of a web page, and some search engines use this information when displaying search results, so the more relevant the better.
• Image optimisation: As search engines aren’t human and can’t read the content of a photographic image for example, it is important that each image on a web page contains additional information to describe it so search engines know what the image depicts.
• Headings: Search engines will see some written content on a web page as more important than others, such as headings at the beginning of paragraphs. Good headings will contain your target search terms, for example if your web page is about stocks and share prices you would use a heading such as ‘Stocks and Share Prices’.
• Page naming and site structure: The way in which a websites’ pages are named is a very important part of SEO. Every page is a file and how you name these files will help describe to the search engines what the page contains. An example of poor page naming would be a page named ‘information.htm’ which doesn’t give any indication of what the page content may be. A good example of page naming is illustrated in the example below for a page about ‘Berlin City Breaks’ which is named ‘berlin-city-breaks.htm’

External link building

Another important part of SEO is the process of building good quality, relevant links from other websites to yours. This is one of the most time-consuming aspects of SEO but also one of the most important.

External link building is achieved by contacting the owners of other related websites that you wish to have a link to your website on. This is sometimes an automated process, whereby another website owner may have a link request form for example, but generally this is a manual process and comes down to the site owner to decide whether they want to link to your website or not.

You may have heard of ‘reciprocal links’ which is where you place a link to another website from yours in exchange for them linking to you from theirs. You could think of this is the currency of SEO link building, so adding a ‘Useful Links’ page to your website would be one of our recommendations.

External link building is important as far as building your relevance is concerned. The more websites (relevant to your products or services) that link to yours, the more important the search engines will deem your website to be on that topic. We say ‘relevant to your products or services’ as it is of little value having a website on Fly Fishing for example linking to your stocks and shares website.

Keyword research and analysis

Before embarking on your SEO it is important to research your target search terms (also referred to as ‘keywords’). Keyword research entails looking at the existing keywords that are included on your website, checking their potential effectiveness and finding other potential keywords that may be worth targeting to drive traffic to your website.

We use the latest industry standard software to assist in our keyword research, using data available from search engines such as Google. This software looks at alternative keywords that people have been historically searching for, as well as determining the potential effectiveness of the keywords you may be already targeting.

This research may throw up some unexpected recommendations, but can highlight search terms that you may not have considered or that your competitors aren’t targeting on their websites.

This research will help us to determine the best strategy for which keywords to target for your website, and help to ascertain the best way to structure your website and which content is more important, and most importantly have the highest chance of driving visitors to your website. The example below shows some keyword research for a driveway and patio company:

What we do

Any SEO campaign will take a little time. There are no quick fixes or guarantees of achieving high rankings for your keywords on the search engines. It takes time for your website pages to be listed, and ranked in the first instance, before the results can start to be seen. Once the results start to be seen we continue to monitor your rankings, update your website as required and continue with external link building to keep increasing your websites’ relevance.

A typical SEO campaign will include the following items;

• Keyword research and review with the client, with a view to building a list of the initial keywords to be targeted.
• Your current search engine rankings and highlight areas that need to be improved
• Analysis of your website structure (page naming for example), the code behind the website (meta tags), content, page headings, internal links and so on – a general ‘health-check’ of your current website and work on areas to be improved.
• Additional pages and content that we recommend adding to your website and incorporate new pages and content as required
• Re-submission to the major search engines to ensure your website is listed on them, along with additional submission tasks such as submitting site maps. Site maps are files that you submit to a search engine to provide specific information about the pages and content on your website.
• Link building campaign started.
• Regular reporting and review with the client

Which search engines do we target?

We target the major search engines covering the majority of web users in the UK. Google is of course the primary focus, but in addition to Google we target the following search engines:

• Bing
• Yahoo
• AOL
• Altavista
• Ask
• Lycos