Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is today the most hotly discussed subject in the circles of Internet Marketing SEO because, unlike the old days, it’s no longer about getting lots of traffic — it’s about getting relevant, targeted traffic. Your search engine marketing strategy has no skeleton to stand upon if proper SEO efforts are lacking in it.

Primarily, you get traffic from the following sources:

Search Engines: People search for certain keywords and key phrases and then find your link on the search result pages. If your website is optimised for those keywords and key phrases, you are ranked higher. This is natural ranking, and such Optimisation is referred to as organic Optimisation.
PPC Advertising: PPC stands for Pay Per Click such as the Google PPC program AdSense. Even Yahoo! and some other search engines offer PPC advertising. In PPC advertising, your bidding per click decides where you link is displayed and you pay for every click.
Links From Other Websites: Other websites display your link if they find your pages worth linking to. For instance, blogs with similar themes often link to each other. Then, if you submit articles to other websites they publish your brief bio, including a link to your website. These days you can even purchase link places from websites that get high traffic, directly, or through some online link-broker.
Indexes and Directories: Online directories like DMOZ are also good source of traffic. These directories, like the conventional directories, list websites under various categories like business, education, online advertising, web designing, marketing, etc.
Word of Mouth: When your website contains lots of valuable information and people begin to hear about it from their friends and acquaintances, they visit your website straightaway. This sort of traffic-building takes lots of time and effort.
Text and Banner Ads: Online advertising has been a part and parcel of Internet Marketing for years now. You must have seen banner and text ads on various content-based websites, especially information portals and online publications. Surfers have had a love-hate relationship with banner ads but with improving technologies and greater experience, they are less annoying these days.
E-zines and RSS Feeds: Established e-zines, especially the ones having a few thousand subscribers, too are a great source of targeted traffic. If you publish an e-zine or RSS feeds from your website, only those people subscribe to them who either share your interest or are interested in regular updates about your business. They send you highly focused clicks.
Stationery and Other Publications: When people notice your URL on your letter heads, visiting cards and other stationery, they often visit your website. Sometimes when your company and its URL are mentioned in articles in magazines and newspapers then too you get highly targeted traffic to your website.

So these are the main sources from where you get highly targeted traffic, and among these, the most favorite amongst all the web masters and site owners are the search engines, and hence, Search Engine Optimisation gets so much prominence when it comes to generating traffic. If done properly, and with perseverance, the major benefits of Search Engine Optimisation are:

Search Engine Optimisation gives you long lasting results. SEO is a methodical, continuous process and as long as you keep doing it properly, with persistence, there is no chance of your website ranking poorly. Sudden changes in search engine ranking algorithms don’t affect your rankings if you are not following the “blackhat” SEO tactics and simply keeping your website search engine optimised in a more “organic” manner.
Search Engine Optimisation earns respect from searchers. It’s often observed that searchers and surfers prefer visiting websites that appear naturally in the search results, rather than appearing inside banner ads, text ads and pay-per-click ads. If you appear naturally, it conveys that you have worked hard to get on the first page and you have really got quality information on your website.
Search Engine Optimisation is a lot cheaper compared to other methods of getting traffic. Agreed, sometimes you have to pay to an SEO company or your content writers to get your website search engine optimized, but once your website is optimised, the clicks are literally free, especially when it comes to competing for highly competitive keywords and key phrases. Sometimes you have to pay £1-£20+ per click for certain keywords, so even hundred clicks can take your expense beyond £2000. You can spend an equivalent amount to get your website optimised and then reap the benefit for a long, long time.
Search Engine Optimisation helps you keep your website up to date. The quintessential condition of remaining search engine optimised is, keep updating your content, keep the source code neat and clean, and stick to the relevant context as much as possible. Keep your navigation well ordered and make sure the site map contains no broken links.

Consequently, Search Engine Optimisation not only gets you targeted traffic from all the major search engines, it also helps you do more business as your customers find your website friendlier and updated.

OK, you may ask, this is all well and good, but how can one make sure that the website is really optimised without employing an SEO Specialist? Good question! Here are a few things you can do to search-engine-optimise your website:

Optimise for humans, not for search engine crawlers

The search engine companies like Google are constantly working at improving their search quality. After all their traffic depends on what sort of results they provide to their users. That’s why they want their crawlers to index and rank pages that should sound useful to the human searcher. Focus on your visitors, on your readers. Write your content keeping in mind how your audience is going to consume it. Make sure your website is accessible to as many people as possible. Keep in mind that if you optimise your website for humans, you automatically optimise it for the search engines.
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Research your keywords before starting your Optimisation campaign

Keywords are important because they decide what pages show up in the search results. The search engine users type in keywords and key phrases and pages that talk about these keywords and key phrases are presented on the search result pages. Although we generally know what keywords are relevant to our websites, sometimes it is difficult to predict what the others are going to use. Use tools like Google Keyword Sandbox, Overture Inventory, WordTracker and Yahoo! search marketing data to find out what people are using to find websites like yours. Focusing on wrong keywords not only wastes your Internet Marketing efforts, they also send your business to your competitors.

Create a compelling copy using your keywords

SEO Copywriting - It is never advised to stuff you web page text with keywords. Use your relevant keywords to create a compelling copy, and if you truly stick to your subject, you’ll be using your keywords sufficient number of times. The keywords-to-the-rest-of-the-copy ratio doesn’t make any sense if your visitors cannot make out what you are trying to say. Use your keywords, for example “SEO Services” where their appearance seems natural and don’t use them where it doesn’t.

Create content worth linking too

Search engines like Google take into consideration how many websites link back to you, and with the emergence of Digg and other social bookmarking websites, getting linked to has become an inseparable part of Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing. Although you cannot create interesting as well as informative content for every product and service under the sun, be creative and focus on your niche, and people will link to you.

Use the right words with the right tags

Although the <h1></h1> tag has been over-used and hence is losing its luster within the search engine ranking algorithms, using it once in the beginning to encapsulate your page heading gives an idea of what your page contains. Create a page heading that contains your most important keyword expression. Once or twice, highlight your keywords with the <strong></strong> tags. Then you can also use your keywords as anchor text — text between <a></a> — and as bullets. Make appropriate use of meta tags such as TITLE, KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION; it’s doubtful how much relevance the KEYWORDS meta tag gets, but your TITLE tag definitely plays crucial role in your rankings. And anyway, if nothing else, it appears as a hyperlink on the search results page along with the content of the DESCRIPTION meta tag, and this can influence how many people click your link.

Keep your source code clean

A page with cleaner source code makes it easier for the search engine crawlers to index your web page properly. Cleaner code also makes your pages light and lighter pages not only load faster, they also save you lots of bandwidth cost when thousands of visitors come to your website everyday. In terms of the search engine crawlers, less code means your relevant text appears near the top of the page, and the sooner your relevant text appears, the better it is.

The parts discussed above are internal search engine optimization specialist procedures and they mainly involve improving your website and its content. There is also external search engine Optimization that involves other websites. In external SEO you encourage other, “external” websites to link back to you.

SEO is a highly competitive field and you need lots of patience to pursue it, whether it is your own website or your client’s website. As they say, slow and steady wins the race here. There is no short cut to SEO and you have to tread the path of hard work and a carefully crafted strategy. It’s a science as well as an art. For further information contact Doublespark-SEO - UK SEO Consultants.

This article can be downloaded in and distributed in PDF format only, by clicking the link below:

Search-Engine-Optimisation.pdf

Additional up to date SEO information can be found on this SEO Blog.

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