SEO Ideas

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all about you, your organisation and the internet. It is the process you adopt to try and ensure that people find your website as easily as possible, and preferably before they find your competition!

Let us think about a time before the internet - you start up a business in a town, to promote it there are two areas to consider:

• The business itself - making sure that your shop windows carry adverts / making what you sell very clear / training your staff to answer the customer's queries in a simple, direct and relevant way
• Outside the business - making sure that there are always pointers to your business - from the chap you hire to walk the streets shouting "Oy yea, hear this..." to newspaper adverts, customers recommending their friends, etc.

The internet is really no different, for SEO there are two key areas to consider:

• Your website
• Outside the website

For both, there is one common key - relevance, search engines (such as Google / Yahoo / Bing / etc.) all have one aim in mind - to present the most relevant answers to each query string. So, your task (or our task for you!) is to ensure that your website is as relevant as possible for the query strings where you want to be the answer...

Your website

In your website there are some key things to do:

• Keywords - very misunderstood, Google does not use these, but some search engines do, so you might as well have them - these are words related to your organisation, so if you are a School Teacher / Tutor, you might include: school, tutor, qualified, maths, english, 7-11, etc.
• Description - more important, this is the description of each page on your site.
• Titles, the title for each page (appears in the browser title bar and tab)
• URL - the actual web address of the page
• Page content - what your actual page says

These are grouped together - for each of these they should be unique to each page, relevant to each other (i.e. relate to the content) and accurate, i.e. if you have a page selling cars, but your keywords / description was about caravans, then that would be seen to be non-relevant.

• Site maps, (they tell the search engines where to go and index pages)
• Robots.txt, (linked with site maps you can ban search engines from indexing private content)
• Site submission, tell the search engines you exist.
• Fresh and up to date content - if search engines see it changing regularly then they will consider it to be more up to date and therefore probably more relevant.

If you are using a copy of our Flarebox CMS these are built in as free modules to allow you to run your own SEO, if you have a static website, then it needs to be done manually.

Outside the website

Search engines such as Google are trying to calculate, using rules, which sites are the most accurate and relevant, and they use a wide range of rules to do this. A part of it is to use the information provided by each website, but more important than that is what others say about your site - this is considered to be more relevant and more independent.

• Links from other sites (minor influence but still useful) pref. not just in a list of links.
• Links from content of relevance (e.g. an article on lawnmowers linking to your lawnmower repair website is of more relevance than from a website of no relevance).
• Links from websites which themselves rank highly in search engines - so an article on the BBC website is of far more influence than your local newspaper, or a website belonging to a friend.

Getting these links is simply a matter of being out there and present on the web. Ensuring that you are a part of relevant forums and communities, that you respond to items of interest etc. i.e. that you build up a web presence - It is not possible for your website to do this for you - it is a PR / marketing exercise and it is best when it comes directly from you - your building up a reputation / expertise on the internet will drive people to your website.

So, that is a simple overview - in later articles we will look in more detail at SEO...