Part 1: An Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation
I’ve been putting off this series of posts about SEO for a while, because it’s such a massive topic that I’ve been struggling to decide how to approach it. SEO is a multi-million pound industry, and there is no end of companies who will take your money off you to ‘optimise’ your web site and improve your search engine ranking, but I believe that there are some basics that we can all follow to improve our search ranking without paying out big bucks. I’m going to break this into 4 parts:
Ensuring your site is found by search engine spiders
Improving your ranking in the search results.
A bit of Context
The problem we all face with SEO is this: nobody truly knows what it takes to get to the top of Google. Some of us have a fair idea, but because Google doesn’t want people to cheat the system, they keep the ‘algorithms’ they use to rank web sites in their index a closely guarded secret. The companies who will take your money off you all have their own view on what it takes to get to the top based on experiments, research and guesswork. Some of them are brilliant, some of them are rubbish, few of them will put their money where their mouth is and do a pay-per-results offer which speaks volumes to me.
My knowledge is based on 11 years of trying to get my client’s sites to the top, and also marketing my own e-commerce web sites with some considerable success. In this series of posts I’m going to tell you why SEO is important, and tell you every trick I know to get your site into the search index, and ranking highly for specific search terms.
How do search engines work?
On a simple level, search engines like Google and MSN have electronic ‘spiders’ which ‘crawl’ around the internet constantly. These spiders might visit your site once a year, once a week or once every day or even more regularly, generally dependent on how often you update or add to your web site content. They move around by following links on pages either within a single site, or between different sites. Once they arrive at your site, have a sniff around your site, read what they can, try to work out what each of your pages is about, and then report back to the search engine and tell it what they’ve found. Based on this information, and other factors which i’ll go into later, the search engine decides which search queries your site should be found against, and how high up the search results your pages should appear.
So why is SEO important?
SEO is what will ensure that you are FOUND in search engines. Just building a web site isn’t enough. You need to build it so that if / when search engine ‘spiders’ find your site, they’re able to ‘crawl’ it, find all the content, read it, and index it (ideally so that you’re found against the search terms you want to be found against!). There are two elements to SEO: getting into the index, and then ranking highly in the index. Most search ‘traffic’ goes to the top 10 results for any given search term, so unless you’re on page 1 of Google for your desired search terms, they will be ineffective. And if you’re not being found in search engines, you’ll have to rely on costly paid advertising to generate new leads to your web site, so it’s worth doing your best to mop up the free traffic through search engines.
Which Search Engines are important?
For most of Europe 80% of your traffic will come from Google, then the rest from Yahoo, MSN and then smaller search engines. Focus on the top 3 and you will be getting the best return on your time investment.
Picking your search terms
It’s important to put some thought into what search terms you actually want to be found against. Try to put yourself in the mind of your customer. If you were looking to rent a property in your region, what would you be searching for? If you’re at a complete loss, or want additional ideas, you could always use Google’s really handy (and free) keyword suggestion tool which is here:
and shows you how many search queries there are for the keywords it suggests per month. Don’t always go for the most obvious or high search query ones, as they’ll also be the most competitive. Your chances of being top of the rankings for ‘gites in france’ are next to zero because of the competition, but your chance of being found for ‘france gite rural’ are better. So, now that we’ve got an overview of how search works and why it’s important, my next post will cover how to prepare your web site for SEO.
An Introduction to SEO
Part 1: An Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation
I’ve been putting off this series of posts about SEO for a while, because it’s such a massive topic that I’ve been struggling to decide how to approach it. SEO is a multi-million pound industry, and there is no end of companies who will take your money off you to ‘optimise’ your web site and improve your search engine ranking, but I believe that there are some basics that we can all follow to improve our search ranking without paying out big bucks. I’m going to break this into 4 parts:
A bit of Context
The problem we all face with SEO is this: nobody truly knows what it takes to get to the top of Google. Some of us have a fair idea, but because Google doesn’t want people to cheat the system, they keep the ‘algorithms’ they use to rank web sites in their index a closely guarded secret. The companies who will take your money off you all have their own view on what it takes to get to the top based on experiments, research and guesswork. Some of them are brilliant, some of them are rubbish, few of them will put their money where their mouth is and do a pay-per-results offer which speaks volumes to me.
My knowledge is based on 11 years of trying to get my client’s sites to the top, and also marketing my own e-commerce web sites with some considerable success. In this series of posts I’m going to tell you why SEO is important, and tell you every trick I know to get your site into the search index, and ranking highly for specific search terms.
How do search engines work?
On a simple level, search engines like Google and MSN have electronic ‘spiders’ which ‘crawl’ around the internet constantly. These spiders might visit your site once a year, once a week or once every day or even more regularly, generally dependent on how often you update or add to your web site content. They move around by following links on pages either within a single site, or between different sites. Once they arrive at your site, have a sniff around your site, read what they can, try to work out what each of your pages is about, and then report back to the search engine and tell it what they’ve found. Based on this information, and other factors which i’ll go into later, the search engine decides which search queries your site should be found against, and how high up the search results your pages should appear.
So why is SEO important?
SEO is what will ensure that you are FOUND in search engines. Just building a web site isn’t enough. You need to build it so that if / when search engine ‘spiders’ find your site, they’re able to ‘crawl’ it, find all the content, read it, and index it (ideally so that you’re found against the search terms you want to be found against!). There are two elements to SEO: getting into the index, and then ranking highly in the index. Most search ‘traffic’ goes to the top 10 results for any given search term, so unless you’re on page 1 of Google for your desired search terms, they will be ineffective. And if you’re not being found in search engines, you’ll have to rely on costly paid advertising to generate new leads to your web site, so it’s worth doing your best to mop up the free traffic through search engines.
Which Search Engines are important?
For most of Europe 80% of your traffic will come from Google, then the rest from Yahoo, MSN and then smaller search engines. Focus on the top 3 and you will be getting the best return on your time investment.
Picking your search terms
It’s important to put some thought into what search terms you actually want to be found against. Try to put yourself in the mind of your customer. If you were looking to rent a property in your region, what would you be searching for? If you’re at a complete loss, or want additional ideas, you could always use Google’s really handy (and free) keyword suggestion tool which is here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
and shows you how many search queries there are for the keywords it suggests per month. Don’t always go for the most obvious or high search query ones, as they’ll also be the most competitive. Your chances of being top of the rankings for ‘gites in france’ are next to zero because of the competition, but your chance of being found for ‘france gite rural’ are better. So, now that we’ve got an overview of how search works and why it’s important, my next post will cover how to prepare your web site for SEO.
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