What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

I'm going to try and explain this in as simple a way as possible and that has nothing to do with me thinking your are one sandwich short of a picnic or anything (honest!). It's more because I hate unnecessary technical speak, theory or jargon. Plus I'm a visual person and pictures and imagination helps me to understand better. If you are one of those who needs the theory, jargon and technical speak..........go see a doctor and get yourself cured! Ok, so seriously, there is no reason to get all technical and clever as SEO is largely not difficult to understand and do at a basic level.

So then, what is it? Well, imagine you've decided to open a shop. You have some wonderful products at great prices and you're confident that you'll get lots of customers and make much big money! First lesson: never assume that just having a shop will make customers come, it won't. Chances are, your shop is small and it's tucked away in some god forsaken back alley somewhere in the depths of the dark, untrodden part of town. So how do you get your wares in front of your customers eyes? Pay to get in front of their eyes!

Commonly known as "pay-per-click" in search engine terms, this is where you basically pay a premium price to place your shop in the busiest place in town. "Great idea, problem solved" I hear you say..............whoa boy, not so fast. Just because you pay to be in the most prominent place doesn't mean you will sell mucho producto. It doesn't mean that you're guaranteed that people will like what they see in your shop. It doesn't mean that someone else won't setup next to you and offer the same thing cheaper. It doesn't mean your landlord won't decide to put the rent up and price you out of this top space. Get my point? Ok, paying to be at the top of the search engine listing won't guarantee you success. These kinds of listings charge you a fee everytime someone clicks on your link. The cost of each click for these top links is also expensive. So, if 100 people click on your link and Google charges you £3 per click that's £300 big ones you've just spent. Now, out of those 100 people, the reality is that you are only likely to get around 5-10 people who will actually buy something. Let's say your average sale value is £50. Chances are you'll have just made a loss and given Google money for nothing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not say you should never do it, I'm just saying that it needs very careful consideration.

Key things to consider when looking at paid promotional listings:

• To make "pay-per-click" work, you need to pay to be in the top three.
• You pay everytime someone clicks on the link, whether they buy or not.
• A fair proportion of people that click on your link will be a waste of time (sales people, data gatherers, web companies).
• It's typical to have a click through rate (CTR) of less than 1%. This means that however many times your listing appears when someone performs a search that is relevant to your listing, you are going to get less than 1% that will actually click through to your site.
• It's paid traffic. As soon as you stop paying, the traffic stops.
• It's not easy to specifically track the success of your listing to measure "return on investment".
• You are always trying to outbid your competitors for the top slots which can push the cost of each click up.
• Paid listing is a long-term strategy and a short-term cost. It needs 12 months to start to get the best from it.

The biggest point to make here I guess is that "pay-per-click" or paid listings is not SEO. It doesn't drive your rankings and is only as good as your willingness to keep paying for it.

Back to your shop then. So here you are, stuck in this dark and dingey part of town with no one visiting you and no money coming in. What to do? The answer is to go out and find the customers, make your part of town much more exciting, give people a reason to travel your way, make the town's planners (or Google people in this case) want to have your shop in the busy part of town!

I know, I know "that's all very well to say, but how?" Well let me tell you........SEO, that's how! Everything I've just mentioned in the previous paragraph is no different to SEO. It's about doing things to your website that will make Google think it's more relevant to the person searching, than your competitors. It's about promoting your site to the wider world in order to get people interested in coming to see your site. It's about placing links from other websites that are relevant to yours and helping Google see how important your website is in the grand scheme of things. This is SEO.

Now, let's explain a few of these things in a little more detail.

Making your website relevant

• Google wants pages with good healthy content, that read as though a human wrote them and aren't just stuffed full of the same keywords over and over again.
• Google wants to see the right elements on your pages such as headers, bold text, alt tags, these are the boxes that should appear when you hover over and image (try our logo up top).
• The title, description and file name should all be relevant to the content of the page. I see far too many sites that use the same information for these on every page. This is effectively telling Google that each of your pages is relevant for the same things.........not good!
• You should study your top five competitors and look at how and where they use their keywords. Type the words you want to rank high for in Google, then click on the top five listings in turn (not the sponsored listings in pink) and look at their site to see how they use the keywords you've just searched on. Try to mimic how they use these words on their pages. If they rank high for them then there's a good chance it should improve your rankings too.

Getting links to your site from others

This is a fundamental part of SEO and should not be underestimated. It's both time consuming and challenging to do but it's the most effective element for improving where your site ranks. This is kind of like going around all the other shops, telling them what you do and how great you are. Some of these other shops will also think you're great and offer to put a poster up in their window to advertise your shop. This is the same concept with getting links from other sites to yours. If other's see your site as useful and valuable they might just create a link for you. Once that link is in place, Google will see it and class your site as more important because of it.

Now, a word of caution here, be careful how you build your links. One link is as good as another but some are more good (in my head that made sense!). What I mean is that there are different kinds of links and they achieve different things:

• Reciprocal Links - These are links you exchange with someone else's site. They make a link to you on their site and in return you make a link to their site. These are always useful to try and get if the site you exchange with has some relevance to your products or services. Google places more importance on links that share some relevance. You can still exchange links with unrelated sites, but Google may choose to ignore these because it thinks they are just for SEO purposes (Google ain't stupid!).
• Paid Links - These are links that you pay to have put on someone elses website. They can be in the form of an advert or a simple text link. Paying for links can often produce a volume of links in a short time but beware because Google doesn't agree with paying to get a link. If it thinks you are doing it for SEO purpose you may end up paying for a whole bunch of links that Google ignores. If you want to pay for links, do it for the marketing opportunity rather than the value of the link.
• One-Way Links - These are by far the most valuable and rewarding to your SEO efforts, but they are also the hardest to come by. People don't just give these out like donuts! These links, if relevant, are a potential goldmine for SEO and can leapfrog your rankings. One-way links are achieved in a number of ways such as:
• Writing articles for article submission sites. You can usually place a link to your site in the signature box at the bottom of the article. Submitting the article to a relevant category can give you a useful link.
• Posting comments on blog websites. The golden rule here is to read the blog post so the comment you make is pertinent to the article. If you just post a random statement, chances are the site owner will work it out and block you from posting. Given that you won't find this out till maybe a week or so later, this could be a real waste of your time. So, read them, make your comment count. Again, choose blogs that are relevant.
• Social bookmarking. This may involve you setting up some accounts on social networking sites and posting comments and articles to them. You can also join groups and post to their pages giving you more links. This is a vast resource for link-building and can also build good traffic to your site.

BIG WARNING - link building can suck days, weeks and months of your time, rendering you a social outcast, disconnected from your family and causing you to implode under the stress of spending so much time building links. Ok maybe a little dramatic, but it's true. You need to plan your time wisely to do a certain amount per day else you'll become addicted to the next link and the next one. Trust me, been there!

Ok, so that's a very brief look at what SEO is and what's involved in it. It's kind of like thinking of dipping your toe in the SEO water and first needing to know the very very basics. There is a lot more to know about seo that can make your efforts much more sophisticated, streamlined and less effort intensive, but you need to get to grips with crawling first before you try walking.

We do run a fabulous SEO Training programme which can teach you much of what we've touched on here, but show you practically how to optimize your pages and build links effectively. With hands on tuition and good opportunity for practice on your own website it's a must programme for anyone who can't afford to retain and SEO Consultant or just wants to do things themself.

To talk to us about SEO or your site, get in touch. To find out more about our SEO Training read the Training Overview. Alternatively, call us on 01283 535562 or e-mail us at info@pageoneofgoogle.co.uk