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.

Of course, we would like to be as high as possible on page one. A site that’s half way down page seven is unlikely to be bombarded with enquiries! No-one knows all the factors that Search Engines (SE’s) use to determine your rank. They don’t want us to know.

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.

On-Page and Off-Page considerations are taken into account. A certain amount of page ranking weight can be attributed to off web geographic influences. SEO can’t control these though. (We will cover off page optimisation in a separate article.)

Search Engine Optimisation ‘On-Page’

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.

The only time that ‘on-page’ becomes important is when you have taken care of ‘off-page’ and have a lot of inbound ‘back-links’. If that’s the case, internal linking and a certain amount of on-page fine-tuning can reap rewards.

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 realise 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.

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 time goes on, we’ll benefit from an automatic improvement on the bigger 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. We basically go after the high-converting phrases with ‘commercial intent’ – i.e. customers who are looking to purchase!

Your home page isn’t the only place for back-links. Spread them liberally around your website. This is known as deep linking. Product Group pages are a good place for back links. They very frequently link up to a range of sub-pages, so driving appropriate terms to them can be very worthwhile. So don’t limit the back links to one page. Bing, Yahoo and Google are all paying more attention to the way a website’s pages are managed and listed.

Copyright Scott Edwards. Hop over to SEM Consultants or jasonkendall.co.uk.

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