Improve your search engine ranking with SEO

What is SEO
'SEO' or Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making your site compatible with the way search engines discover and rank web pages. Being shown on the first page of search results can bring your site much more traffic than if it was listed on the second page or lower, among thousands of similar pages on the web.

How to do SEO
If you want people to find your business at the top of search engine results, you need to start with good content on your site.

The benefit of spending time creating good content for your site is that it's instantly available to everyone in the world. If you're not selling products overseas or offering services globally, there will still be people out there with an interest in what you do and how you do it. These people can help build the profile of your site by visiting it, interacting with it and referring to it in related sites all over the web. This can help to make your site more popular.

Search engines like Google are always looking for sites that appear to be popular, because they're generally seen as having better quality content. This means that for any given search, a more popular site will usually appear higher in search results than an unpopular site.

Starting to get noticed by search engines
Having your site found by the big search engines is the first step, but they will usually find most sites by themselves after a short while. Once they've found your site though, they need to know what your pages are about so they can match them to the search phrases (keywords) that people use to find information.

Matching pages to search keywords involves more than identifying how many times the keywords appear in a page - it includes how much of your site is about similar topics, the content on other sites that your page is linked from (and links to) and the overall 'tone' of your content. For example, search engines recognise the difference between pages that are focused on selling and those offering information - this helps them understand which page may be best for searches like 'camera prices' or 'camera reviews' (try changing the slider between 'shopping' and 'researching' on this Yahoo experimental search engine. (If that link unreachable, this Yahoo Research page has more info).

Giving customers what they want
To give your content the best chance of making it to the top ten search results, you need to consider its main subject and purpose and keep your real visitors in mind.

People aren't always looking for the lowest prices and the biggest discounts. While there may always be a place in your site dedicated to those messages, people usually need to feel familiar with a business before dealing with them over the internet. The way to develop a level of trust is to show people how well you know your industry, your products and your customers.

Imagine you're meeting a potentially valuable customer for the first time. What might they ask you about - your opinion on current affairs in the industry, whether you've been busy recently, new products becoming available, what other customers are buying, what features people are asking about, your accreditations, the benefits of your services, your pricing terms, how your products are manufactured, service-level agreements, delivery options? You could probably talk for hours about these in a face-to-face meeting, but more people are looking for evidence of your reputation online. This information is what they're searching for and it's usually full of highly relevant keywords.

Each of these pages should have a strong, unique theme that will distinguish it from other unrelated pages and make it the most appropriate match for a specific type of search phrase. Consider the words and tone of the page and think about how your audience might search for your information - they may be more familiar with buzz-words than product names or features rather than benefits and may use these as keywords. Linking between related pages on your site can help visitors and search engines find all your content and understand the relationships between any different types of information.

Blogs are a great way to deliver timely content, because they make it easy to add new pages as your business or industry changes. Keeping an up-to-date blog tells visitors that your business is 'switched on' and acts as a hint to search engines that you always have fresh content that should be monitored for changes that may affect your ranking.

Using the right words
Searching the web with variations of keywords related to your content will show you how much search results can vary. Try to identify the words that will be the most suitable match for your content and your site as a whole. Where possible, use the most relevant words in your page headings and text to help tell search engines what each page is about. Don't be tempted to 'over-optimise' your pages by filling them with too many keywords that can make sentences unreadable to a visitor - search engines can tell the difference between blocks of repeated words and natural sentences and assign value to the page accordingly.

If you have more than one web site about the same subject, don't copy and paste the same content into both sites. Search engines will recognise content they've seen before and mark the second copy as a duplicate - offering no benefit to either site's ranking. By creating unique content for each site or offering two different perspectives on the subject, you could get both pages returned in the top ten results for some searches.

Improving your search engine ranking
The main objective of search engines is to deliver useful content to someone performing a search. When real visitors find interesting and useful content, they will be more likely to return to your site, tell other people about it and add links to your pages on other web sites. All of this combines to tell search engines that people trust and value your content - this is one of the main goals of SEO and the most long-lasting feature of high ranking pages.

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Nils Berge is a technical marketing consultant and website manager with a background including direct mail, email, print and online media.

His experience in search engine optimisation includes webserver configuration, search engine behaviour, site structure, page structure and content strategy.