The ever developing skill of learning how Search Engines position sites on their organic search listings is known as Search Engine Optimisation. Natural or 'organic' lists form the main body of a SE page. Paid listings are separate to natural listings. The paid listings are typically in a yellow section at the top of the page, and in a column down the right hand side. The 'natural' listings are straight from the main index. Search Engines use algorithms to determine a website's relevancy and importance. This is how they decide on which order to place them in.
Obviously, we want to be as high up the page(s) as possible. If we're the 7th listing on page 9 then we're hardly going to get prospects beating our door down! Nobody can be entirely certain about which factors Search Engines use in their ranking process. They keep it a closely guarded secret!
So as time has gone on, a sophisticated industry has evolved to get the most from the listings. On the one side you have SE's like Google deliberately filing technology patents in many different areas. This causes mass confusion over which methods they use for ratings. Competing with this is the Search Engine Optimisation industry. SEO empirically measures and tests data to establish the more significant factors that the SE's are using.
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. (Off-Page optimisation is examined in an additional feature.)
ON PAGE SEO Explained
On-Page SEO is all about changes you can make directly to a site to make it more Search Engine 'friendly.' This is actually a fairly clear-cut process. It involves such factors as - 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! In reality, this is very easy to control, but not wildly effective. Indeed, it could be said to basically not have much influence at all. Previously we could make an impact with On Page configurations. That's not how it is now though.
Having said that, if the website benefits from off page optimisation, then on page work should be looked at. When that's happened, on-page factors can be optimised.
Things To Consider... A phrase that shows vast numbers of results should not be your first SEO target. 'Car Insurance' is a term to stay away from - unless you want to compete with 70,000,000 others! It's not rocket science to realize that competing in this area wouldn't be productive.
However... The phrase 'Southampton Car Insurance' only brings in three hundred thousand. (Relevant if that's the locality I work in). This still seems quite a large amount, but it's actually not in search terms.
Now my chances are significantly improved. In actual fact, it takes very deep pockets to get a premier listing for a term like 'car insurance.' I would actually be competing with the insurance conglomerates! Which is really not a good idea.
Therefore, we're looking for phrases that yield less overall results - but quite accurately sum up what we do or what we offer. We call them Long-tail phrases, as they're made up of a few particularly chosen keywords. Long tail can be anything from two to about seven words long. It depends on your competition. They're usually around three or four.
We prefer to begin optimisation strategies with phrases that bring in less than five hundred thousand results. (In some cases, we may go with a higher count - if the current page 1 results are not well SEO'd.) We'll automatically move up the ratings for the more popular search terms as we gain more back-links. If we've worked well, we can start hitting the bigger terms in a few months time. This strategy is also far more targeted at the start. Frankly, we're only interested in the customers who are looking specifically for what we offer. There's much more chance these people will buy!
Don't just limit building back links to your website's home page - link them up to various sub pages as well. We call this 'deep-linking' - and Google in particular likes this. For example, build links to the pages that group products. That's because pages like this generally have links to several individual pages. Do not simply build links to your website's home page. Search Engines are increasingly focused on the individual pages within a website.
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