Search Engine Optimisation – or SEO as it is known – has evolved into a very complex skill.  However, as a website owner, there is a minimum that you, yourself, absolutely have to know.
Firstly, while a skilled expert in SEO can work some wonders for your site, you should know that there are no magic tricks that can be employed to “get you a number one ranking”.
No-one knows exactly how the search engines – most importantly Google, since this is by far the most-used search engine – rank a site for a certain keyword. All we can work with is what we know has worked, until now. To add to the complexity of the issue, search engines change their “algorithms” all the time. It is not (only) to shroud themselves in mystery that the search engines do not reveal exactly how they work. It is because they do everything they possibly can to give good results, and if people know exactly how they work then they can cheat, and the search results will not be as good. When I mean good, I mean listing the most informative and relevant sites for a certain keyword – the sites that you are looking for.
You can do a lot of work ON your site to make sure your site is as ready as possible for the search engines. But did you know that what happens OFF your site is equally, if not more, important?
“Off-site” optimisation
Two essential “off-site” factors play a huge role in your site’s position in the search engines and you must pay attention to these.
Firstly, the amount of traffic you have will boost your search engine visibility. If you have a site which attracts lots of visitors, the search engines will see that site as “important” and rank it highly.
You can increase your traffic by offline marketing (press releases, brochures, etc. – even word of mouth), as well as online marketing (paying for adverts or getting write-ups on other people’s sites, etc.).
The other really important “off-site” factor is the number of inward links, from relevant sites, your site receives. Try to get your site listed in directories and on other sites with a similar area of interest, and engage in link exchanges. This will boost your search engine position (as well as your traffic).
Let’s look the other aspect, what you can do to your website to ensure that it is as ready as possible for the search engines.
“On-site” optimisation
The best piece of advice is simply to create the best and most informative website about your topic that you possibly can.
But while doing this, you need to be thinking about keywords. What are the most important keywords for your website?
What do I mean by this? Well, if you put yourself into the shoes of your prospective customers and think, if they are looking for a site that offers what you do, what will they type into the search engines in order to find it? For example, “walking tours in Paris”, “yoga class in English”, or “Wordpress training in Paris”. You need to make sure these words are in the main heading on your page, towards the beginning of the text of the page and, if you can manage it, repeated again in the text, without it looking contrived. If you have other keywords, then put them in the text as well.
Did you know that Google goes entirely, or almost entirely, by the text on the pages of your website, in order to decide the subject matter of your website and therefore how to list it? So you can see how important the “copy” on your web pages is and how you need to think about this before you begin writing. It’s no good thinking your webmaster will “fix it” for you by putting clever things in the code – that’s just not how it works.
When building your website, your webmaster will also ask you for:
i) keywords to put into the code of the pages. (These are for the benefit of the other search engines, who do use these for their results.) Put your most important ones first and include other less important ones. Do not go wild though, just a handful is perfectly adequate.
ii) a page title for your home page, which will usually be your business name plus your most important keyword or phrase – for example on my site my home page title is “Alannah Moore, WordPress training and website consultancy “.
iii) a description, which is a short sentence describing your business and including your keywords, which is what you will see in the search engines listings underneath your site name – for example, mine is “Wordpress training in English; website consultancy based in Paris, France.”
You can’t just leave these things up to your webmaster – they don’t know your business or your target market, and you can’t just leave them to guess.
As I have said, search engine optimisation and second-guessing Google’s algorithms have developed into a complex pseudo-science. You don’t need to know everything – but you do need to know at least this much.
On a final note: you may depend on your search engine ranking in order to get new clients for your business. If this is the case, I advise you to dive right into it, get up to speed, and liaise with your webmaster who will take care of the technical side of things, with your guidance on which keywords to focus on (there are other things that the webmaster should pay attention to and will do so with your assistance – the right way to name images, adding image descriptions, naming the links in the navigation, etc.).
But if the most important way business comes your way is via word of mouth, then you may not need to get overly worked-up about the search engines and your position in them.
Equally, if it seems that your market is extremely crowded and you fail to get any kind of reasonable listing in the search engines, I would advise you turn your attention to offline marketing methods to get traffic to your website and secure new clients. Brochures, flyers, adverts – and all the other old-fashioned methods – still work and you can use your website as a valuable tool to back you up with testimonials and other illustrations of your expertise.
You can’t just sit back and hope that customers will come – they won’t – and you have to use all the means you can to get them.
(Last updated August 17 2010)
