Article ID: 001

"The SEO PROCESS"

October 2004

Search engines are businesses, and competent businesses at that. Improve the quality of your website, and you can improve your website visibility.

This article gives an overview of the correct method for optimising a website for better search engine visibility.

Overview

To begin with, it's important to understand what search engines actually are. Search engines are privately owned websites, which hold a database of other websites on the internet. As a Yellow Pages holds listings of businesses, a search engine holds listings of other websites.

When a search engine user types in a search term (or "key phrase"), and submits the search, a number of results are returned. The results are links to websites which are relevant to the search submitted. For example, if you entered "flower pot", the search engine may return websites which sell flowerpots, discuss flowerpots, critique flowerpots and so on.

The results are returned in order of relevance . This means that the websites at the very top of the results returned are more relevant to your search term than the ones at the bottom. The website at the very top may be www.flowerpot.com which may be a large site concentrating on only flowerpot related issues. The website at the very bottom may be something unrelated to flowerpots, but the phrase "flower pot" is mentioned a couple of times, so it gets listed in the results.

How Does a Website Get Into a Search Engine's Database?

In the same way that your Yellow Pages does not contain details for every business in your area, a search engine such as Google does not contain details of each website on the internet. A website has to find it's way onto the Google database in one of 3 ways.

Site Submission / Paid Submission

Once your site is created, you can submit it to a search engine and request that they list it in their database. You can do this for free - but the timescale between submission and eventually appearing on the search engine may be as much as 6 months. For a fee, the search engine in question will fast-track your inclusion, and this is paid submission.

Search Engine Spiders

Search engines use a piece of technology called a spider. A spider is a piece of software which periodically "crawls the web" (hence it's name), and rechecks all sites which are contained on it's database. This ensures that the results the search engine offers are up to date. A spider will return various data about a website, which will determine the position of that website within the search engine's listings. If a website (which is already on a search engine's database) links to your site, the spider will follow the link and subsequently return data about your site - thus, you become listed.

Pay-per-Click

Rather than rely upon SEO to obtain a premiere position within a set of results, you can pay for a sponsored link. This works by companies bidding on "clicks" - i.e. for each customer that visits your website from the search engine, via a sponsored link, you pay a fee. This can be a few pence, or several pounds, depending on your bid. The company that bids the highest for clicks appears the highest in the ranking. This is a good method for promoting a site in a hurry, but can be quite expensive in the long run as you are paying for clicks, and not for sales.

Getting your web site listed within a search engine's database is of course necessary. However, given the volume of websites listed on a search engine, and the volume of web sites listed within the database, what specific factors decide which web sites appear at the top, and which appear lower down?

Quality Service, Quality Website = Quality Positioning

A search engine is an independent business. The search engine's customers are the businesses that advertise within the search engine, but also the people that use the search engine to search for things.

There are thousands of different search engines available - some very obscure indeed. Most internet users have heard of the larger search engines, for example:

• Yahoo
• Google
• MSN
• Infoseek
• Excite
• Ask
• Mamma

Given the competition within the search engine marketplace, it is of great importance that a search engine offers a good service to it's customers. A quality service - in search engine terms - is providing quality, relevant results for any search a customer submits.

If you were to visit a search engine, submit a search, and receive a list of results that were persistently irrelevant to what you were looking for, you would be reluctant to use that service again. You (and everyone else) would look elsewhere and the search engine with the poor results would lose all of its customers. Therefore, quality results are important to the success of a search engine. So, how do we define quality?

Relevance

This concept of relevance is very important to the quality of results. It is important that your web pages contains they key phrase (such as "flower pots"), in the correct quantity, and in the right format . But it's not that simple.

You may be thinking that it would be very easy to repeat your key phrase over and over - more times than your competitors - and that you would rank higher. In essence, you would be correct. In the early days of search engines, this technique - called "key word stuffing" - was a method employed by people wanting to incorrectly influence the order of results within a search engine. It's cheating.

A page with a key phrase repeated over and over does not usually constitute a quality resource for a search engine's customers. Therefore search engines implemented various systems to prevent this technique from being effective. Nowadays, when a search engine's spider crawls a page, and a key phrase is found in far greater concentration than you would expect for normal language, that site is deemed to be a potential cheat, and may be penalised by either pushing the site to the bottom of the search results, or removing it from the database altogether.

Cheating

Keyphrase stuffing is one technique used to cheat results. There are many others, and over the years and in an attempt to ensure quality relevant results are supplied to their customers, search engines have taken steps to penalise website owners that are seen to be cheating.

Something business owners should be aware of is that there are many companies offering "search engine optimisation" services that involve cheating tactics. Common sense is called for here. Search engines can offer massive return on investment for those companies that find their way to the top of results for competitive key phrases. You cannot optimise a website for a minimal sum without recourse to cheating. Unfortunately, it is your website that will be penalised if you are caught cheating. See here for further information.

Value

We've looked at what not to do in order to obtain a good ranking. Now, we'll look at what needs to be done.

Value is defined as "a quality that renders something desirable". For our purposes, a website that offers value to it's visitors is a desirable website to visit. Therefore, search engines will rank websites with value much higher than websites with zero value.

But value is very subjective - how does a search engine assess this? It's quite simple - the greater the value a website offers, the more independent websites will link to it. Links are viewed as "votes" - if a website has many votes, we can assume that, for a particular key phrase, it contains something which people want to look at.

This system of ranking via link popularity is the current technology used to rate and rank the relevance of a website. It's a good system which favours websites that take the trouble to offer good value to its visitors. In turn, a search engine's customers will find good value in such websites. It's also a very difficult system to cheat. This system of viewing incoming links as votes is called "link popularity".

Search Engine Optimisation

Link popularity is a major factor in ensuring a good ranking - but it's not the only one. It is still important that your web pages contains your key phrase (such as "flower pots"), in sufficient quantity, and in the right format.

Powerful, effective Search engine optimisation - that doesn't put you at risk of getting penalised by search engines - should be planned into a site from the outset. Our web design services ensure that - where relevant - pages are created as "search engine friendly" as possible.

The value your website offers is also a fundamental concept, and one which we discuss with you at length during the planning stages. By giving a little to your website customers, it's possible to receive a great deal in return.

The difficulty in achieving a high ranking for a particular key phrase will vary wildly depending on the competition for that key phrase. Therefore, SEO MUST be undertaken on a bespoke basis, and the cost will be relative to the difficulty involved. If competition is fairly mild, the cost will be low. If competition for high ranking is fierce, the cost will be higher, but the returns will be extremely worthwhile for your business.

Conclusion

• Your web site design should be "search engine friendly"
• Your web site content should offer tangible value
• Your web site content should be relevant
• You should actively seek links to your web site
• Beware of companies offering low-cost SEO with "cheating" tactics

Our complete web design and e Marketing service can assist with all of these requirements. If you have any further questions about SEO, and how it can help your business, please do not hesitate to contact us.