The SEO Game

Any web site is worthless if it fails to attract visitors, most importantly this requires a pleasing design and interesting content that holds the visitors attention beyond the initial 'click off' time. There are many ways to attract new visitors but one of the most important, and certainly one that can't be ignored are visits as a result of a search, and that requires that the site does well in its search engine rankings.

If a site has external links to it then sooner or later it will be found by the search engines at which point they will incorporate the data found and the site will then have the potential to be listed in a search. Most often a sites owners will be disappointed with their sites search engine rankings, and there may be many reasons why it doesn't do well.

To help owners acheive better rankings many companies offer a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) service, indeed it has become big business in the last few years. There are many techniques that are used, some of which can described as gaming the search engine, with some techniques being more successful than others. This is why in nearly every search there will always be some sites which are totally irrelevant.

For a site to do well there are certain fundamental rules of thumb which should be observed, and if they are we've found the results to be very successful and the need to further 'game' the search engines is not needed. These fundamentals are also an 'honest' approach to SEO and won't result in the site dropping out of the rankings due to its being penalised for adopting a more dubious technique.

For this to work the old maxim 'content is king' is true and as the 'domain expert' the site owner must be involved and identify the key words that he/she expects his/her site to be found with. Although quite often the key words the owner thinks are important are not always the key words visitors are using to find the site, and this is where analytics packages are very useful as they will help to identify the search terms that result in visits to the site.

With the key words identified suitable articles for publishing on the site based on those key words must then be produced.

The articles should ideally include the key words in the title and also in the content although not in such quantities that its obvious that search engine 'gaming' is going on. Above all else the article must read well and be interesting to a visitor, as the article will become the first port of entry to the site for many new visitors, so attractive images which complement the text are also a must. Having made the effort to get the visitor there you don't want them 'clicking off' straight away!

Once the articles have been written how they are presented on the site becomes key, not only from a human perspective, but also from a search engine 'robot' perspective. Page construction is important with the key words being included in the pages <Title> tag (the words displayed in the browsers Title bar & tab). As we have already mentioned the key words should be in the article title which is preferably enclosed in the HTML <H1> tag which denotes the importance attributed to those words, and is therefore a key indicator of the subject of the page with the key words being repeated in the article itself to reinforce the 'relevancy' to that subject.

The page itself should also include the key words in its name (e.g. Database-and-Software-Development), this helps to reinforce how important these words are to the subject of the page and thus helps the page to score more highly in its 'relevancy' rating. This is because every link to the page will also include the key words.

Above all else the page needs to be found both by people visiting the site and the search engine robots. Thus the page needs to be incorporated into the sites navigation structure so that visitors who are browsing the site can easily find it. If possible the article should also be cross linked to by links on other pages in the site, assuming the link is relevant to the subject of that page which should ideally include the key words (e.g. Web Solutions), which will hopefully result in the search engine scoring the page more highly for relevancy to that subject because the links will impart meaning.

The site owner will also need some patience as it will take time for the search engines to visit the site, discover the new page(s) and incorporate them into the search results. This is also where the creation of external links can also help, especially if the link is from a page which is meaningful to the subject of the page being linked to.

If using a Content Management System (CMS) then software choice will also play a big part in the success of any SEO project. We know that for the above fundamentals to work effectively the capability must be baked into the CMS code, such that the user can specify the page names (with suitable keywords) and the page title with the software then incorporating the page name into the links themselves. If the links generated by the CMS are unintelligible then an important SEO tool is being ignored!

Finally, you may quite rightly be asking how do we know that this works. In reply all we can say is that since we wrote and deployed the first version of our  Content Management System, ConvallisCMS, on this site 12 months ago which does indeed work by these principles we've enjoyed good search engine rankings. For the key words we use to measure performance, the site has rarely been below the first two pages of Google (normally on page one) which we think speaks volumes in itself. We're also given this advice to our customers and friends and those who have taken it onboard have seen improvement in their own rankings.