Search Engine Optimisation

So how does a page get a high rank on Google?

Defining SEM, SEA, SEO and LP
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process related to promoting all of your website's pages to the search engines. Included in this process would be Search Engine Advertising (SEA), which would be the sponsored search advertising - also referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. These are the sponsored links that appear along the top, right-hand side and bottom of search results. Also, included in SEM would be Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and your Link Popularity (LP) program which increases the number of links to your website.

What is SEO?
It is important to understand how to tell the search engines that a particular page of your website is an authority in a particular topic. Keywords and phrases are utilised to communicate this expert status to search engines. Each page of your website can be optimised for a topic based on its visible content. You should be using each page to help drive traffic to your website. This does mean that for a particular search result, visitors may enter your website from somewhere else other than the home page!

Each search engine has a different algorithm in deciding what the person searching is seeking and how relevant the information on the individual pages of your website relates to the search. They take into account the title of the page, the meta description and the visible text. Some search engines do look at your meta keywords, but not nearly as much as they used to in the past. What you are presenting with visible text is what the visitor will see; and therefore, the content has more value than the meta keywords. This also prevents spammers and fraudulent websites from hiding their true identity.

One important action is to upload a site xml map to the search engines to tell them what to index. This can speed up the process of getting indexed by three months. You will also be able to dictate to the search engines which pages should be the landing pages.

Why is SEO Important?
Search engines have an enormous task to filter and index all of the web to provide something meaningful to the searcher in a matter of seconds. Compared with the old days of using search tools like Archie and Veronica that required hours and sometimes days finding information on the Internet, the results from the current search engines are significantly improved.

But it is a very competitive market so you need to seek out the right resources to help you to optimise your pages and give you a fighting chance.

What to do before your SEO?
I have recommended a number of tools that provide information about what people actually type into the search engine and the number of searches performed over a 30 day period, as well as how many competing web pages exist for that search term. These are the three major parts to the research you are seeking. The search engines can provide you the first two with their tools, whilst the third item may require you to perform a search in quotation marks to get a real understanding of the total number of competing web pages. There are third party tools that can also provide the complete information, however, always keep in mind that the search volume is not an absolute from any source - including the search engines. Use the information as a guideline to give you direction. Regardless of the tool(s) you use for your research, they will all provide you with options for other key phrases to consider based on your initial entry. This will be helpful in considering other alternatives you may not have thought about.

In this process you will learn two important items:

• Firstly you will learn that the rest of the world may not necessarily search for your website's products and services in the way you might expect them to. For example, you may be ranked number one for a particular term, but if no one is searching for that term, what difference does it make if you're number one or number 100? Go with terms that people are searching.
• Secondly, you will want to seek out a balance between the number of searches and the number of competing web pages. The search term that has several million competing web pages will take you longer to rank, whereas those that are only in the thousands will be easier. Take a look at the search volume to see what would happen if you had 1% of those visitors purchasing? Based on what you are selling you may not need to be ranked for terms that have thousands of searches. For your business, those with lower search volumes and less competition may suffice as a foundation.

Consider your research as a starting point, not an end point. You can always change your optimisation later; and always keep in mind that you can optimise the pages within your website to cover a variety of possibilities from your research.