Sos Roofline Systems

SEO is an evolving study of the factors which search engines use to ‘rank’ you in their natural listings.

When we search for anything, up come the natural search lists. These do not include the paid listings. Generally, the paid advertising is on the right of the screen. A box at the top of the page will also contain paid ads. All the others are ‘naturally’ listed from the Search Engine’s index. Search Engines use algorithms to determine a website’s relevancy and importance. This is how they decide on which order to place them in.

We want to be right up there where we can be seen. No-one’s going to find us if we’re listed on page seven. It’s impossible to know about all the SE’s rank determining factors. The SE’s really don’t want anyone to know – so you can’t manipulate or ‘game’ their system.

So, over the years a complete industry has grown up around this. On the one hand there are SE’s purposely filing a wide array of new patents. Causing much mystification about their methods! On the other hand, there’s Search Engine Optimisation. This utilises a series of tests and measurements to determine the most pertinent factors.

Search Engine Optimisation deals with both on-page and off-page issues. There are also ‘off-web’ factors such as demographic and geographic information – but we have no control over this area. For a full discussion of Off-Page factors, please refer to our other article on this subject.

On Page Optimisation

If we can make changes to our site to make it more friendly to Search Engines, this is called ‘on-page’ optimisation. It’s not too complex – it just requires setting up your web site correctly. For example: The correct use and density of keywords and internal linking; H1 and H2 header tags and meta tags.

It doesn’t matter if all that sounds very confusing.

In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. Some would argue its effect is so small it’s irrelevant. There was a time when SE’s were ‘duped’ by On-Page optimisation. Not any longer though.

If, however, off-page has been optimised, (and there are many inbound back-links), then on-page continues to be important. If that’s the case, internal linking and a certain amount of on-page fine-tuning can reap rewards.

Things To Consider…

Avoid doing SEO on keywords that have millions of listings. For example, on Google’s Search Engine you’ll see 70 million listings in the UK for the term Car Insurance. It’s not rocket science to realise that competing in this area wouldn’t be productive.

On the other hand… The phrase ‘Southampton Car Insurance’ only brings in three hundred thousand. (Assuming I was a car insurance provider in Southampton.) This still seems quite a large amount, but it’s actually not in search terms.

I could expect to get ranked far more easily for the longer phrase. In actual fact, it takes very deep pockets to get a premier listing for a term like ‘car insurance’. I’d be up against massive multi-nationals! Not a sensible option for anyone.

We should concentrate on more accurate ‘phrases’ that give us less competition. These ‘long tail’ phrases might contain a number of specific keywords. They could be anything from two to seven words in length. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long.

In general, our recommendation is to begin SEO’ing with keyword phrases that reveal fewer than 500,000 results. (If the sites on the front page haven’t used SEO techniques, then we might go with bigger yields). Over time we’ll gain ground on the larger search terms. This will happen automatically through building back links. If we put in enough effort, we can go after those big phrases in 3-12 months time. This strategy is also far more targeted at the start. We go for the phrases that people who are looking to buy are using.

Don’t just limit building back links to your website’s home page – link them up to various sub pages as well. Google and the other Search Engines like this ‘deep linking’. Category or Product Group pages are a good example. These pages are usually linked to particular product pages. This means it can be very productive to drive search terms directly to them. Don’t just create back-links to your home-page. How your site’s pages are managed and listed is gaining more and more attention from Google, Bing and Yahoo.