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The art of Search Engine Optimisation
From Shadowfax
So much has been said on the Internet about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that it is perhaps foolish to attempt to say any more. However, having spent a lot of time reading it all and then having put some of it into practice I feel the need to put thoughts into some order for my own benefit as much as for anyone else.
There is a lot of hype. There is a lot of hope. But at the end of the day it all boils down to a few key principles.
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Content
Good content is the cornerstone of Search Engine Optimisation. There is no shortcut to this. If the site has nothing new to say then it deserves not to rank. I worked for a company which did no SEO at all, but which consistently produced high-quality, high-profile content. One of our managers called in some SEO consultants and, after giving us all their 'best advice', they were very surprised to find our site already had a higher google ranking than theirs.
Make sure your content is fresh, relevant, well-written and honest. If your main site needs for some reason to stay relatively static, then find ways of having parallel sites which can be updated regularly whilst pointing firmly at your core site.
Search engines like sites which are updated frequently - so adding new content is a good thing. However, updating existing content is a double-edged sword. If a page is ranking well then you need to be sure that updating it preserves all that is good about it because relevance is a factor. Renaming or moving a page can be a bad idea - particularly if you change the URL and don't redirect appropriately!
Keywords
Google lives and breathes keywords. If your site has the wrong keywords it will never attract the right traffic. I struggle with this one and I think that many academic or creative people do also. If I have a beautiful photograph of a group of flying swallows and I title it poetically "Aerial Ballet" no bird lover will ever find it. Some ballet lovers might - and immediately bounce off my site because it is of no interest to them.
It is sad, but it is true. SEO often means dumbing content down. Keywords mean talking about things in the way that people really talk about them, not the way you want to market them. If your website is selling televisions then make sure it talks about "televisions" and not "state of the art home movie systems".
Thinking about keywords and making sure they occur in URLs, titles, headings, alt tags and body tags can go a very long way.
Visibility
My third item is often referred to by the more limited concept "backlinks", but I prefer to think of is as visibility. If you are just starting out on the web and you have no reputation to build on or favours to call in, then let's be honest you will struggle. If, however, you own a global multi-million pound company which bizarrely has not had a web presence to date you will probably not. Why? Because reputation and visibility counts. Our fictional multi-million pound company may run off a few dozen press releases and hey-presto back links appear in articles on the BBC website. It's not just about advertising. It's about whether other people know you or respect you enough to link to you.
So how do you get visibility if you have none? There are doubtless many techniques. For me it comes down to three main things.
Be nice to webmasters
Link to other people's sites. Comment on their blogs. Help them with problems in the forums. Be generous with your webspace and time. Not everyone will repay you with a link or traffic - but some will.
Be active in the relevant community
Find out where your customers are online, and then be there. Not to sell, but just to be seen. Contribute in relevant discussion. Use any and all channels to raise that visibility. Make sure that your link is always in your signature and profiles. Don't push it - but don't hide it either.
Don't be afraid of a little shameless self-promotion
Engaging in self-promotion is a delicate thing. Do it in the right way and people will not even notice that is what it is. Having one standalone website may not bring in a lot of traffic. However, running an active blog which links deeply into the website can start to help. As can contributing to sites which allow it (for example Squidoo).
Robot Friendly Pages
In order to do well in search engines the robots which crawl the pages must be able to find your content. This means ensuring that links are visible to robots not just humans. Embedding links in JavaScript or Flash is generaly a bad idea for this reason (unless you also offer the robots an alternative link). Writing good HTML which validates against standards is also helps. It also makes a big difference if your keywords occur in your links and URLs. Having a link "Click Here" which goes to a page "12341.html" means nothing to a robot. Having a link "Televisions" which leads to "televisions.html" on the other hand highlights the relevancy of the content.
Time
The final element of SEO is time. Both in the sense of duration (Google likes established sites) and investment. If spend two weeks doing some of the above and then don't do any more it may not have any effect. Investing a few hours a week for a year may reap a lot more benefit. Traffic building can be a slow process to start off with, but once it starts to build it can, to an extent, be self-maintaining.
Twitter and SEO
Twitter deserves special mention as one of the tools of the moment although in and of itself Twitter will not help with SEO, because its links are no-follow. However, as a visibility-building mechanism it works extremely well - and visibilty brings in backlinks.
It allows you to find like-minded people. It allows you to engage in their conversations, promote their links, retweet theior posts and generally be nice. And it allows you to self-promote as well. If you mostly do the former two and a little bit of the latter you will probably do well. The more you self-promote, the more people will tune you out.
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