Internet Marketing Information and Resources

The letters S.E.O. stand for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is the reworking of a website’s content so it performs well in search engines for specific keywords.

Prospective clients often say “get me to the top of Google”. The questions I must then ask are…

• The top of Google for what?
• How much do you want to invest?

These can be frustrating questions from the client’s perspective. Most people don’t know what keyword phrase best serves their interest, and haven’t given serious thought to the amount they’re prepared to invest to get there.

This article takes a look at what’s involved in the SEO process, and so make it easier to understand what set of compromises will work best for the website owner.

SEO has 3 parts

There are 3 separate parts to search engine optimisation. They are…

1. Research
2. Content optimisation
3. Backlinks

These 3 parts must be done in the correct order (i.e. 1-3 in the above list). Search Engine Optimisation always starts with research.

Research

It’s not possible to optimise a client’s content until I know what keywords I need to optimise for. For most clients, that means…

• Looking at how search engines currently see their site (keyword density reports on the main pages)
• Looking at where the site currently sits in search engines
• If the site is doing especially poorly, find out why
• Build a short-list of useful keywords for this site…
  • Number of searches per month
  • Amount of competition for each word
  • Quality of competition for each word
• Create a plan of action and a proposal for the client

The research step can take anything from 2 through 8 hours. The time involved depends largely on the complexity of the client’s site and nature of the industry they’re competing in.

For example, the research phase for London Security Guards was short because it was a brand new site, and there was no complexity to worry about.

It was an entirely different matter when it came to Perspex Furniture. In this case, the client had specific requirements that were counter-productive to SEO. There is also quality competition that required additional effort. As a result, it took longer to work out an SEO plan likely to work.

Content Optimisation

As soon as the client agrees to the SEO plan, content optimisation can begin. Its main function is to ensure the search engines index the site for the selected keywords.  This involves the following…

• Make sure the homepage is focussed on the 1-3 most important keyword phrases
• Make sure internal pages support the homepage
• Make sure the navigation includes all pages we need Google to find
• Register with my Google webmaster account
• Build and submit a Google sitemap (XML document)

This can be a quick process, because the hard work is done during the research phase. Of course, there are exceptions. This corporate entertainment client also serves the wedding reception, private party and charity function market. The 4 different markets have incompatible keyword phrases, making it very difficult to optimise effectively. That’s where experience really pays off.

Backlinks

For all but the least contested keyword phrases, content optimisation isn’t enough to get a site into Google’s top 3.

If a keyword phrase has any competition at all, it won’t be enough to merely optimise content. Backlinks will also be required. Here’s why…

Google looks at who is linking to a site. It records the context present in those links, and attempts to match them to the main keywords it finds on the page being linked to.

It’s not enough to generate a lot of links. To be successful for specific keyword phrases, it’s useful if those links are…

• Contextual
• From sites with good PageRank
• Directed to optimised page(s) within a site
• Appear over a period of several months (i.e. not all at once)

Backlink generation is the final component that pushes a site up Google’s results pages. The number and quality of backlinks required depends entirely on the keyword phrases the site is competing for.

The more searches per month there are for a particular keyword phrase, the greater the number and quality of backlinks must be. The amount of time required to generate those links increases too (i.e. one hour per week for 6 months will deliver a better result than 6 hours per week for one month).