Search Engine Optimisation: impact and visibility (Part 1)

Search Engine Optimization: impact and visibility (Part 1)

Best practice in SEO as part of a search engine marketing strategy

By Koushikchakraborty13 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process and practice of ensuring that the listing and link to your website is placed in the optimum position within search engine rankings, such that it appears at the top, or near to the top, when a search is made using a specific set of words or key search phrases in Google or Bing, for example.  This is often referred to as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ search - because it does not require any direct payment to the search engine company in order achieve the ranking - to distinguish it from ‘paid search’,  which is usually classified as any search for which a payment has been made. Examples of paid search include: sponsored links, search engine advertisements, pay per click (PPC), cost per impression (CPM).  The focus of this article is on the principles of successful and legitimate SEO, an approach that is often referred to as ‘white hat’ techniques. That is, techniques that ensure that the main focus of SEO activity is on ensuring that the customer is able to search for what they require and receive search results that provide them with exactly the listings that they need, rather than an approach that seeks to manipulate those results to maximise the possibility that the search engines will rank the page highly, regardless of the relevance of the content to the customer.  The best way to think about this is in terms of a cowboy movie: the good guys usually sport the typical white Stetson, whereas the bad guys are usually in the black ones. Needless to say, in order to achieve the right results, the Stetson on your head should be white!

The basic premise behind SEO is that the more highly a website is ranked in the natural search listings, then the greater the amount of web traffic it receives and the higher the number of visitors accessing the site. In an age where Internet use is ubiquitous and business needs to ensure that it is accessible to its customers online, this obviously has significant consequences for the visibility of an organisation and the corresponding level of business and profit that it is likely to achieve.  Not surprisingly, with such high stakes, a number of websites sought to improve their rankings, not by making the content more relevant to the user, but through the adoption of various techniques that enhanced the sites rankings in the face of the algorithms, or programmes, by which the search engines ranked and listed websites.  These so-called ‘black hat’ techniques included such practices as ‘keyword stuffing’: placing so many key words within sentence, such that they render the words completely unintelligible, but manipulate the search engine into believing that the website is of greater relevance than it really is.

In the first paragraph, I mentioned that SEO is a process, by that I mean that you will not enjoy the benefits of an optimized site if you merely engage in optimization when you first develop the site.  Instead, it should be something that you engage with on a regular and incremental way, with the accumulated impact of a large number of changes delivering an improved user experience to your customers and a payoff in terms of higher rankings within those organic or natural search rankings. By adopting the best 'white hat' techniques, you will be able to develop SEO practices, which will ensure that your website benefits your users and customers.

The common mistake that most people make when they first approach SEO is to believe that the primary target of their activities is in satisfying the rapacious needs of an impersonal and electronic brain called a search engine: this is something that I term the ‘black hat fallacy’. Some of the leading search engines, and particularly Google, have taken pains to reinforce the message that the primary focus needs to be the consumer, or the user of your site, rather than viewing the search engine s the target of your activities. So let us get this straight from the very outset, you are optimising your website for the benefit of your users and not the search engine itself.

SEO may form part of your broader search engine marketing (SEM) strategy, which may itself be an element of your overall marketing strategy.  Whilst you will remember that we are not intending to treat the search engine as the customer of our optimization activities, we do need to have some understanding of how they work and also how people use them to facilitate their searches.  From our market research, we should have a good idea of who the target audience for our product or service is and so we can then develop a clearer picture of the type of search keywords or key-phrases that they are using to find products or services such as ours.  Think for a moment about how you search for something using a search engine, such as Google. How often do you input just a single word (keywords) or how often do you string together a number of words into a set of keyphrases? The next time you search for something, think about what it is that you are looking for and then consider why you selected those specific words. This will help us in the next article when we consider further the practices of SEO.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net