Are you constantly bombarded by SEO companies’ offers to get you to the first page of Google? Come to this free seminar to find out what they actually do so that you can do it yourself! We can’t guarantee that you will get yourself on the front page, but you will leave understanding what it is all about and with an array of tips and tricks that you can put into practise. If you still want to employ an SEO expert afterwards, at least you will know what you are buying!
So, that was eLignum.
We wanted to bring all that experience to the aid of local SMEs.
But, we found that providing reports and recommendations had no value
Why do we need SEO? Most people have the Field of Dreams approach to their websites – “Build it and they will come”
Unfortunately, that approach just won’t work.
First, let’s just clear up what SEO is.
SEO is helping people find your website – your webpages – your blog. Essentially, it’s marketing.
So why doesn’t the Field of Dreams approach work? Well, how many websites are there in the world? Take a guess.
There are nearly a billion websites in the world. One for every 8 people.
Now that’s a lot of competition. How can you possibly be found amongst all those other websites?
If you were in the top 10% of websites – you’d be in a group of 86 million. Get to the top 1% and the group narrows to 8.6 million.
There are ten slots on the front page of a search result – and it matters where about on the page you are displayed. Top position gets you 33% of the traffic. Drop to position 5 and you’re now only getting 5%. Not on the front page – forget about it.
Here we can visualise what that looks like.
So why SEO. Obviously we need to rank well to have any chance of people clicking through to our website. And we know how important our website is, can be, should be.
People are looking online for solutions – days of the Yellow Pages are pretty much over.
We see how much time people are spending online – so we know it’s a great way to reach them. And, potentially inexpensive if you consider the market place.
But SEO is difficult & expensive. We’ve seen how many websites there are & how important it is to be at the top – so its going to be impossible for you right?
Maybe not – there were two guts on safari.
They came across a hungry leopard
One of the guys slowly took off his backpack, took out his running shoes & slipped them on.
Amazed, his friend exclaimed – You’ll never out run a leopard!
I don’t have to – he replied – I only have to out run you!
Your SEO only has to be slightly better than your competition & you’re at the top!
There are 4 billion searches a month – that’s your opportunity.
So we know SEO is important. Before we dive into how to improve your SEO
First, lets, take a minute to understand how search engines work.
Think of the internet like the tube network. There are a series of interlinked stops – we can think of these as web pages. Starting from a single station, the spider can soon travel to every other station in the network. The spider crawls from station to station recording it’s name and the information it can find about it.
The search engine then indexes these results and stores them in huge data bases. The content found on the site is weighted according to how useful it may be – such as how many times a keyword was repeated or where about it was on the page.
What happens when someone searches
We’ll lets search
Google uses our search term to retrieve websites from the index. But given that there are so many web pages & results – here we see nearly 3 billion! How does it show us what we want?
Search Engines use an algorithm to refine the search and present the most appropriate pages. An algorithm is a set of rules that when followed, can solve problems.
Google has a number of different algorithms, but their workings are kept secret – and really, there’s no point trying to work out exactly what each does.
Its worth taking a minute to understand the types of search that Google recognises.
Navigational search – here we see people looking for a specific website.
Informational search – here people are looking for info
Here we see people looking for a product or service
We understand how SEs work – but there are limitations that need to be considered
When indexing pages and content the SE’s come up against obstacles. If you have these on your site, containing key content, then the SE cannot see it.
We see websites as they are presented and can read & interpret everything on them. This is great, because websites are designed for people.
The difficulty is that SE’s cannot interpret websites the same way humans can. When developing a website, you need to consider how the SE sees it, not just how the end user sees it.
So what other factors do Search Engines take into consideration. How do they list those pages in the search results in a useful order.
Links from important sites, like .gov or .ac carry a lot of weight
Two types of SEO. Onsite & Offsite. Building the authority of your website is key to SEO. Links from other website are some of the most important signals that Google uses in determining the value of your site.
Let’s look at how we should go about improving our authority through Link Building.
When building links it is important to consider the quality of that link.
Here we can explore some link building strategies
The second type of SEO – onsite, starts with keywords. Adding the correct keywords to your website is probably the single most important thing you can do to influence your search rankings. Don’t just put any old copy on the website – remember to write for the Search Engine as well as the visitor.
Research what words you need on your website before adding copy.
You can see what Google thinks your website is about by visiting Webmaster tools.
You can check your competitors keywords to see what they are using. Look at high ranking sites for ideas – but be careful – maybe you don’t want to rank for the same words.
You may come up with a list of keywords – all of which a similar – but which one should you use. Use Keyword tools to determine the traffic levels for each keyword and use that one. You can look in your analytics package to see how your keywords are performing.
You should now have an idea of the sort of things that can help your SEO. But there are some tips you can apply that will make an impact on your search ranking.
Firstly, let’s put ourselves in the place of Google. What are they trying to achieve as a business.
We need to give our users a great experience so that Google is happy sending their customers to us.
Now we have a great website – technically – how can we improve further. We’ll Google will use social signals. If a website is popular – it must be good.
But we need to help the search engines recognise how good we are. We discussed earlier some of the limitations that SE’s have. The next tips help you to work around or avoid those limitations.
Google doesn’t understand images, so we need to tell them what they are. This is a great opportunity to influence search rankings by including keywords.