Advanced Basics of SEO

Why consider SEO

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO is the modern day art of manipulating the information received by the automated programmes that feed search engines. Properly manipulated, the information they receive will pre-dispose the search engine to show your website in preference to your competitor for selected keywords or phrases.

The challenge faced with this concept is that as you realise you can generate revenue from the internet, you will want your site placed higher up the search results to get more traffic.

How high does my site need to rank?

In most cases, you only benefit from undertaking your SEO project once your site ranks within the top results for the given keyword. The reason is as most web users leave default settings for search engines they are only shown the first 10 results when they initially make their search, these 10 are the results that get the most traffic.

We have tracked the difference organic search engine placements make to the amount of directly driven visitors.  Above is a graph showing the average amount of traffic driven through the various placements from all manner of industries.

You will notice over 70% of the organic traffic is driven to sites within the top 10, and over 50% to those within the top 5. An easy way to see what difference it could make to the success of your website if you could only get your SEO campaign successfully implemented.

You can see being in the top 10 is a world apart from being outside it. This is the reason all your competitors want to rank there – but the thing about the top 10 is ... there can only be 10 within it!

Theoretically, if there are 10 people who are more determined, better skilled or who potentially throw more money at it, they could effectively lock you out and hamper your attempts to take the huge advantage that being within the top 10 offers.

Your only way to compete is to learn to optimise your site, or find someone able to do it for you.

How to optimise your site

To optimise your site successfully you need to understand a few basics to begin with. Firstly, it is worth pointing out that all search engines are merely computers. OK, they are very large groups of interlocking computers with enormous amounts of data available – but they are computers. All computers follow very strict rules.

When you understand the rules the computers work to, you can start to understand what you need to do to get a better ranking of your website.

The second thing you need to do is fully understand all the finer points of your website. By this, I mean you need to understand that your site is constructed using a number of different aspects, all of which are reviewed and evaluated by the search engines.

As search engines cannot look at pictures, they have to rely on the information they find within the code of your site. Each page can be broken down into various parts, all of which are viewed and evaluated compared to other sites. The parts of your site the search engine will view and evaluate are:

• Meta Title
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Description
• Body Text
• Body Text In Bold
• The First Sentence according to the HTML code
• H1 Headline Tags
• H2 Headline Tags
• Same Site Links
• The Text Within Same Site Links
• Image ALT tags
• HTML Comment Tags
• The Webpage URL
• Outbound Links
• The Text Within The Outbound Links

Away from your site, the search engine will also have noted how many different sites link to you, what type of content they have and if it is in-line with yours. The amount of relevant links can really help SEO and increasing these with suitable sites should always be an integral part of your overall campaign.

OK I understand all that, what do I do now...

Once you understand how your website is constructed, and what the search engine is going to be looking for, it is time to manipulate the information you have. This manipulation will give the right information to the search engines at the right time, in the right way to ensure you compete strongly with those currently within the top 10.

How do I do it?

The best practice approach is to use your preferred search engine and do a search for your favoured keyword (remember a keyword can be a single word, or a phrase). Once you have identified the top 10 results for this keyword, you should make a note of all the websites in question.

Now, you need to visit these sites one by one, hunting down exactly how they use the keyword (or parts of it in the case of a key phrase) in each of the key areas mentioned above, starting with the 'meta data' and working your way through. If you are unsure how to access all the meta information, simply visit their site and once it is loaded, right click on the page (away from any images) and you should see within your contextual menu the option to 'View Page Source' or 'View Source' or similar. This should open up a text document allowing you to view the HTML code of the site.
Once this document has opened search through for :
Keywords – look for
<meta name =" keywords" content ="The Keyword Info Is Here" / >
Description – look for
<meta name =" description" content ="The description Info Is Here" / >
Title – look for
< title>The title Info Is Here</title >

The rest of the information should be quite easy to find as long as you ensure you only look for the 'body text'  etc  after where you find the <body> opening tag, and before the *</body> closing tag.

OK – I have all the info, what do I do now...

Once you have visited the 10 sites and made a note of how they have used the keyword, or part of the key phrase throughout all the various sections, you need to compare them to each other. The reason you are going to do this comparison is that you will notice that there are general rules that you can draw out for each keyword.

I will not go into a great deal of detail for each rule, but I will show you how to create the rules you will need to work to using the website 'Title'.
For example, if you look at the different sites 'Title' and compare them to each other – you may find

• The minimum number of words in the titles is 4
• The maximum number of words in the titles is 7
• The percentage of space taken by the keyword is between 25 and 45%
• The minimum number of characters in the titles is 16
• The maximum number of characters in the titles is 45
• They all use the keyword between once and twice
• The keyword is never first used before character 6
• The keyword is not used after character 29.

Looking at the information this way you learn that if your sites 'Title' is currently two words and doesn't mention the keyword it doesn't fit into the pattern of the successful sites. It would be a good idea to change your title to be between  4 and 7 words, include the keyword either once or twice – but not so it takes more than 45% of the word count and not more than twice as no others do. You should also ensure your keyword is not before character 6, and not at all after character 29.

What you will have achieved is to create a 'Title' suitable for your site, but one that adheres to a structure we know Google considers good enough to rank in the top 10. If you can do this for all aspects of your site, you can achieve a website with your content on it – properly adjusted to fit what Google wants to see – that is able to rank within the top 10.

I know it may seem a little daunting, and you can expect to put many hours into doing it, but the finished result should be a site you are not only proud of, but one that starts climbing the ranks very quickly.

Is that all I need to do...

After you have successfully completed your on-site optimisation, it is prudent to go through the same process every 4 weeks or so. The reason being that top 10's can change, and a site that would be suitable one week, may need a lot of adjustment the following week.

As well as looking at your on-site optimisation, it would be a great idea to start your off-site optimisation. This is the type of optimisation sometimes referred to as 'link building'. The reason you want to do this is that every good and suitable link Google sees coming to your site acts like a vote for your site. The more votes you get, the more Google rates you.

Do be wary though – there are plenty of firms around that offer to get you many links very quickly which can offer you a quick boost in the amount of 'votes' you get, but it's quite common for these firms to use 'link-farms' which are sites commissioned purely to act as link generators.

Google and the other search engines do not like 'link farms' as they try to skew the results offered and if they identify one, they not only strip it from their data, it's common that they remove linked sites as well. What this would mean to you is that your site would be blacklisted, never again to be seen in that search engines results. Not ideal if you have just spent several thousand pounds getting your site built, plus much more to get it ranking well.

How long will it take to work?

It is difficult to say exactly how long any changes to your site will take to change your position in search engine results. Much of this is out of your control.

• Search engine spider visits your site
• Reports its findings to the search engine
• Search engine re-analyses it's information
• Search engine reports updated results

As long as you are already on Google's database this will all happen automatically, if not you will need to get Google to visit you for the first time. This can be accomplished by either getting linked from a site in Google's index or by submitting a site map to Google. If you need help with these please ask for more details.

Sounds great... but can you help do it?

If you want help optimising your site, you can commission the SEOK consultants to do this for you. As we are aimed at the smaller business the prices are very reasonable, although we are quite capable of working with websites of any size – there are certain packages you can choose from:

• £250 Self Help Report – a report designed to show you where your site is failing compared to those in the top 10. This report will be between 40 and 140 pages dependant on your site and keyword, and will tell you exactly what you need to change and why, showing what your competitors are using right now compared to what you use.
   
• £249 to £349 Single Page Optimisation – If you want a single page optimised, we will create a report similar to the self-help report, and implement the changes for you onto your site. After implementation, we will create an additional report and send it to you so you can see your page is fully optimised. The more pages , the less the rate.
    
• From £2,500 – Website design and Optimisation – it is always better to create a truly search engine efficient site to start with, so if you want a site created to either replace an out of date site, or as a first site you can have one created ready to rank well at a very reasonable cost.
   
• £75 to £150 per page per month – Ongoing updates – as with all things, your sites effectiveness will change due to flux in search engine methods as well as others trying to usurp your position. We offer a monthly 'review and adjust' service ensuring you stay at prime positions month on month.
   
• £425 per month – Off-Site Optimisation; to generate incoming links from the right sites is challenging and time consuming. To build these links takes a few hours per week per site over a period of between 6 and 12 months
   
• £495 – Competitor Analysis; learning who your online cometitors are, what they do to succeed and how you can compete, and beat them can be invaluable. We will provide you all you need to know to create your campaign to win the war.
   
• £299 then from £250 per month - Pay Per Click Advertising Review and Maintenance; as part of our service, we can mantain PPC campaigns through all the major operators, and we GUARANTEE to save you money overall. We will either get you more visitors for the same monthly cost you have currently, or we will reduce your cost for the same amount of visitors. These are net savings after our fees are paid. If you will not save money after our fee, you don't pay us.

If you believe you have a requirement that does not fit into these categories, please send us a message or call on +44 (0)1933 663855