.::.Easy Mind Reading.::.

Fundamentally, SEO is the study of how Search Engines organise sites on their organic search lists. These lists are the main results that are shown when you do a search. They are not to be confused with the Pay per Click entries. The paid listings are typically in a yellow section at the top of the page, and in a column down the right hand side. All the rest have naturally been put into position. The Search Engines look at a site's relevancy and value when establishing its position in the hierarchy.

Of course, we would like to be as high as possible on page one. If we're the 7th listing on page 9 then we're hardly going to get prospects beating our door down! It's impossible to know about all the SE's rank determining factors. It isn't something they publicise to the rest of us!

Nevertheless, an entire industry has evolved around Search Engine listings. So there are the Search Engines busily working on new systems on one side. This causes mass confusion over which methods they use for ratings. And to rival that, we have a large Search Engine Optimisation sector. This involves measuring various factors and doing empirical tests to establish the most important ones to target.

Both 'off page' and 'on page' optimisation is dealt with. There are also 'off-web' factors such as demographic and geographic information - but we have no control over this area. (We will cover off page optimisation in a separate article.)

SEO 'On-Page'

On-Page SEO is all about changes you can make directly to a site to make it more Search Engine 'friendly'. It involves 'correctly' configuring your website. For example: Internal-linking, using H1 & H2 header tags, seeding keywords at the correct density (and in appropriate places,) and to some lesser degree, using meta-tags.

If all that is complete double-dutch to you, then don't worry - you're not alone! It's very easy to control on-page factors. But to be quite honest, they have the least relevance to your ranking these days. In truth, many argue its relevance has disappeared altogether! In the past it was easy to affect Search Engines with on-page SEO. That hasn't been possible for a long time though.

On-Page can still be important though if Off-Page has been taken care of. In that circumstance, some On-Page tweaks and internal links can have an impact.

A Few Handy Pointers... Don't try hugely listed phrases and keywords in your early attempts at Search Engine Optimisation. For instance, if you typed into a Search Engine the term Car insurance, seventy million results would be listed for the UK alone. That's a huge number to pitch yourself against.

But... When car insurance is prefixed with 'Southampton', it becomes a less intolerable three hundred thousand. (Only useful of course if these words describe my business.) This still seems quite a large amount, but it's actually not in search terms.

I've a much better chance in the rankings having added the word 'Southampton'. In reality, getting ranked for car insurance would cost a fortune! I'd actually be head to head with the really big boys. So not a great idea - especially, in fact, when there are much better ways to go about it.

We should concentrate on more accurate 'phrases' that give us less competition. We call them Long-tail phrases, as they're made up of a few particularly chosen keywords. If your market's very competitive, you could be selecting seven word phrases. Typically they will be 3 or 4 words long.

In our opinion, phrases returning fewer than five hundred thousand results are a good start. (If the sites on the front page haven't used SEO techniques, then we might go with bigger yields). As our back links increase, we'll start to rate more highly on the bigger search terms as well. With some effort, it will be possible to have a stab at the big ones within a year. A line of attack like this makes business sense. Basically we zone in on people who are specifically searching to purchase.

Back Links should be shared between several web pages on your site and not just restricted to the Homepage. We call this 'deep-linking' - and Google in particular likes this. Try back-linking product group pages. They very frequently link up to a range of sub-pages, so driving appropriate terms to them can be very worthwhile. Thus - don't restrict the back links to just one page. The managing and listing of individual sub-pages is receiving growing attention from the major Search Engines.