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SEO is “…the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results” (Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization) Or, to you and I: “getting your website higher up in the Google search results” There are two main areas of focus when we undertake SEO of our website: On-site optimisation These are activities applied to your website itself and which ensure that: Search engines can find and crawl through all of the pages and find all of the content of your website. This often involves technical optimisation which includes activities that ensure your website is “search engine friendly”. Keywords are placed in the correct places and density on each page so as to satisfy the requirements of Google Off-site optimisation These activities are undertaken externally to the website and include: Building links into your website from other websites Contributing to Social Media channels (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) Getting Social votes for your website such as Facebook Likes and Google +1’s. Distributing your content an sharing The thing that we use to measure the success of all these activities is known as your website’s Google rankings, which are the positions at which your website sits in the Google search results (SERPs = Search Engine Results Pages) for relevant and valuable search terms. Clearly the higher the rankings then the more successful we have been with our SEO activities. As I mention above, a more useful metric in terms of business success is the number of visitors sent to your website from the Google search results, and to also consider the quality of those visitors too (we want visitors who will ultimately turn into business). Recap: what is Google trying to do? As we discussed in the introduction Google’s aim is to present the best possible set of results to someone doing a keyword or phrase search. So to recap, Google search will value websites that: Are relevant to the search term Contain quality content Contain unique content with minimal duplicate content within the website and also with other websites Are updated regularly Stay around (get older) Are interesting (other websites link to them) Are popular (e.g. people vote for them with Social Bookmarks, Facebook Likes, Twitter Tweets and Google +1s.) Contribute (eg have blogs and RSS feeds) So it the essence of these factors that seem to go into Google’s algorithm, or way of calculating the value of a web page which gives rise to that webpage’s place in the search results for each search term. Key measure: PageRank PageRank is a number that Google assigns to every webpage and represents a measure of the importance of the webpage relative to all of the other pages on the Internet. The higher the PageRank then the higher the value of links from that page. PageRank is an OK general measure of importance when we are building links which we talk about later.
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