Search Engine Optimisation

Organic search engine placement (free ranking)
Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

Recent research has shown that many users trust free-ad results in search engines more than they trust sponsored results. So why do so many businesses pay for sponsored results? It may be because they are frustrated with trying to understand the techniques of gaining organic placement. This article will help you understand the basics of those techniques.


Good page design / build
Your HTML needs to be properly formed to modern standards, preferably W3C compliant and preferably NOT using frames, popup’s or an excessive amount of JavaScript.
Example of a well built website: www.promotionalmarketingexhibition.co.uk
The page title is a focused description of the product/service the site offers.
The page has a balance of images and HTML text.
The page design reads easily and the layout falls easily into most users browsers.The HTML complies with modern standards, there are no FRAMES and no popup’s.


Tags
The 3 relevant tags are: keywords, description and title. “Keywords” and “description” tags play a role in helping search engine spiders to identify the content and purpose of your site and categorize it in their database. They can be thought of as a distillation of the page content. Together with the “title” tag, they also determine what text is shown under your website address in a results page. Research has also shown that this first line description influences which of the top ten results users then click on.

Robots and Spiders
Robots or Spiders, as they are sometimes called, are the faithful servants of the Search Engine that tend to drop by your website unannounced, crawl across every page recording relevant information, then jump off into hyperspace, all the while beaming messages back to the mother ship. Thankfully they are not as malevolent as they sound and can even be guided by you to some extent. Your two mechanisms for doing this are: the robots META tag and the robots.txt file.

The Robots META tag is a simple per-page mechanism to indicate to visiting robots if a page should be indexed, or links on the page should be followed. It is mostly ignored by today’s robots. More relevant is the Robots.txt file. Search engine robots/spiders look in the root of your domain for this file that tells them which files in your site should NOT be ‘spidered’. In this way, a single file can guide them through your website and allow you to have specific pages or directories excluded from the search engines database.
Content
One of the most effective ways to increase the amount of traffic to your website is to offer more quality content.
How does more content bring more visitors to your site?
Many websites are really just company brochures that have been placed on the web. These types of websites usually have five or six separate html pages with a moderate amount of text on them. Whilst it is possible to optimize them for a few keywords and achieve some ranking in the search engines, because search engines strive to rank the most important websites against a search query, this type of site will find it difficult to achieve high ranking against larger sites, especially in a competitive field. More content means more potential relevance to keywords or phrases, as long as its quality content.

What is quality content?
Depending on the type of products or services you offer, there are many ways to build quality content for your site. Here are a few starting points:

• Product Reviews
• Background information on products/services
• Questions and answers/FAQ’s
• Forums
• Guest articles

Whatever you do, keep it focused on your keywords and phrases, although this may happen naturally if you have thought out and structured your additional content properly.

Keyword density
This is just as it sounds - the ratio of instances of the keyword(s) you are trying to promote against the total number of words on the page. Ideally, 2% of a web page's words should be the targeted keywords. Any more could be detrimental and the ideal scenario is where keywords on your home page are individually linked to internal supporting pages like the examples suggested above.

Myths and tricks
In the old days, Search Engine optimization may have been relatively crude, and there were tricks to increase rankings. These days, however, trying to trick a search engine into ranking you highly will usually result in them not ranking you at all. Here are some things to avoid:

• Repetitive use of the same keywords or phrases
• Writing invisible or barely visible text in your pages
• Doorway pages
• Persistent re-submission of your site

Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.