SEO Seminar | How to make search engines love your website

SEO seminar notes

Doublespark SEO and partner companies Titman Firth and Peterborough Copyrighting Bureau combined to give a joint presentation to the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

How to make search engines love your website:

Peterborough CIM Group - 19 September 2007

Presented by:

Gary Cottam - Doublespark SEO
Richard Groom - Peterborough Copyrighting Bureau
Leigh Titman - Titman Firth

Contents:

• How do search engines work?
• Keyword research
• Choosing your keywords
• Using keywords on your site
• Technical best practice
• Other optimisation activity
• Monitoring and maintenance
• Presenters' contact details

How do search engines work?

Search engines constantly send 'spiders' out across the internet. These spiders look at millions of websites every day for the keywords that have been typed into the search engine.

Pages that the spiders recognise as containing the relevant words are recorded in search engine databases. These databases are where search engines look each time someone starts a search, with each site or page ranked according to their relevancy to search words.

It's essential that when spiders visit your site they can easily find the keywords that people most often use when searching. If spiders find plenty of these words on your site you will rank highly in subsequent search results.

Here are some important things to bear in mind about search engine spiders:

• Spiders find it hard to spot words that are buried in Flash sites, so Flash sites tend to do badly in search engine results.
• Spiders also find it hard to recognise words within Frames.
• With so many billions of web pages to visit, spiders tend to favour content at the top of each page - they save time by not looking right to the bottom of every single page.
• In fact, spiders don't look at the page itself at all - but instead at the HTML coding created by the web developer. In most cases, the words near the top of your pages will also be near the top of the HTML coding.
• Search engines tend to give favourable ranking to sites that have lots of relevant content and that are updated often.
• Preference is also given to sites with lots of other credible sites linking to them (see information on link-building later in these notes).

Another aspect of search engines is pay-per-click advertising. We don't look in any detail at pay-per-click in these notes. However much of the information on keyword analysis also applies to pay-per-click.

Keyword research

The first stage in search engine optimisation activity involves deciding which keywords to optimise for. Keyword research and analysis is a potentially complex process. However, there are some relatively simple things you can do to make a good start on the research.

Here's a simple process for keyword research:

1. Start by assembling a list of about 20 possible phrases that people might be typing into search engines. A simple analysis of your organisation's core products/services will make a good starting point. This will produce an initial set of (usually) two, three and four-word phrases that might be used by search engine users.
   Think about the different ways people might phrase what they are looking for. Someone might type 'online car insurance' while someone else might type 'car insurance online'. And remember that people might not use your own company's terminology. You might not describe your products as 'cheap' but potential customers may use the word 'cheap' in their searches.
2. Look at your main competitors' sites to see what keywords they are using. You might spot some phrases that you haven't already thought of. Look at the competitors' pages themselves and their meta-tags.
3. Look at how many actual searches use particular keywords. There are a number of free online tools to help you do this. They include WordPot, Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery and Yahoo's Keyword Assistant. These tools show you estimates of how many search engine users are using the phrases you have thought of. They also show some alternative keyword phrases that you might not have considered.

Note: you can also access the more specialist tools that search engine optimisation specialists use, usually on a subscription basis from a few hundred pounds a year to a few thousand. However, bear in mind that it takes time to learn to use them properly so it may be cheaper in the long run to pay for an optimisation specialist to use the tools they have access to.

Choosing your keywords

When choosing which keywords to include on your site, there are a few things to consider. It is not as simple as selecting the most popular keywords.

The trick is to take into account both of these factors for each keyword phrase:

• The number of searches being done by users.
• The number of website pages that contain the keywords.

You could choose words and phrases that are very commonly used by search engine users. But if you choose only the most common words you will probably be competing against a large number of competitor sites that also use these phrases - and these sites might have a head start on you in terms of optimisation.

Instead, it is often more sensible to choose words and phrases that are used a little less often by search engine users. That's because fewer competitor sites will probably be using these phrases, so you would stand a better chance of ranking highly in search results.

As you can see, there is a fine balancing act here. There is no point achieving the top search rankings for a term that is only used three times a year. On the other hand, it can sometimes be possible to rank highly for very common search terms if the competition isn't doing a particularly effective job of optimisation.

Here are a couple of other factors to consider when choosing keywords:

• Do you optimise for the whole of the UK (or even the world) or just a smaller number of geographic regions? Obviously this is largely driven by the type of work you do. If you are a gardener in Aberdeen then you might ONLY want to show in searches for Aberdeen gardeners. But if you sell laptops across the UK then local geographic optimisation might not be right for you.
• Do you optimise for all your products/services? It may be better to choose just a few initially so that you have a manageable workload.

Using keywords on your website

Once you have chosen your keywords, here are the main places where you should include your chosen phrases:

Headlines

A headline that doesn't contain keywords is a wasted optimisation opportunity. Search engines are much more likely to see a page as relevant to the keywords if they find them in the headline. (One thing we should add here: make sure that your website doesn't create headlines as images, but rather as pure text that spiders can recognise.)

Main body copy

In particular, include each keyword phrase at least twice within the first few paragraphs. Search engines generally like pages that use the keywords a few times - between 2% and 5% of all the page's words - including headlines, body copy and links - is often about right.

If you repeat keywords too often on a page you might annoy readers. One way to get round this slightly is to use punctuation to break up phrases in some cases. Look at this example:

Our home insurance is comprehensive and offered at competitive prices. It gives you excellent protection for your home. Insurance is available in a range of packages.

The above paragraph contains the keyword phrase 'home insurance' twice. However, by spreading it across the end of the second sentence and the start of the third, it doesn't seem quite as repetitive for readers. But search engine spiders will ignore the full stop and still count both occurrences of the phrase.

Links and menu items

Link and menu items like 'products' or 'services' are not great in terms of search engine optimisation. So always try to write links and menu items that contain appropriate keywords.

Try also to avoid having links like 'recruitment' and 'contact us' at the top of pages where spiders look for keywords. You may be able to move these items further down the page but use good design to still maintain visual impact to help visitors find them.

URLs

Search engines also look for keywords in URLs. If they see short URLs that contain keywords they rank the page more highly than the complicated URLs full of confusing letters, numbers and symbols.

In many cases, the reason a site has long, messy URLs is because a content management system is in place. There's no particular reason why that needs to be the case so ask whoever supplies the content management system if shorter, keyword-rich URLs can be created instead.

Other design elements

Although the above list of headlines, body copy, menu items, links and URLS covers the essential 'hot areas' for keywords, you can do more. Other advanced optimisation techniques which when positioned correctly can increase results further include a page description at the top of each page, a breadcrumb menu and scrolling text - all of which would be keyword-rich. Using design, these content elements can be positioned according to their optimisation relevance.

Meta-tags

A common question about search engine optimisation is: "Do we have to include keywords in meta-tags?". Meta-tags are words, phrases or sentences that summarise and describe what is on a website. They are generally invisible to your site readers: they are hidden in the HTML code. (You can see what meta-tags have been written for any website page by selecting 'view source' from your internet browser menu.)

Here are the meta-tags in which you should definitely include keywords:

• 'Title' meta-tag.
• 'Description' meta-tag.

Importantly, search engines often use the title tag and the first 20 words or so of the description tag on their search results pages. This is what readers looking down a list of search results will see, so you should write these carefully. Here is a good example of a title and description tags that present excellent information on a search engine results page:

Womens Walking Boots
Buy Womens Walking Boots from Mountain Warehouse UK. Best Prices on Outdoor Camping, Hiking and Walking gear and equipment.
mountainwarehouse.com/shop/product_list/c_path/43_45_210.html - 129k -

There is a third meta tag worth mentioning:

• 'Keywords' meta-tag.

It is advisable to make the effort to list relevant keywords to his tag. Although at present it appears that Google ignores this meta-tag, other search engines do take it into account. Also, if Google change their mind in the future, you wouldn't want to suddenly have to add words to this meta-tag for the hundreds of pages on an average business website.

Technical best practice

One of the things that you realise when you look a bit deeper into search engine optimisation is the need to follow certain technical standards. By using the right standards, you stand a better chance of success. In particular, these standards help to ensure that search engine spiders can see your site's content.

That's why good web developers take care to use what's known as 'valid code'. Good code validates against W3C standards (see below) and helps towards search engine optimisation - if your site's code is 'invalid' you may well be giving spiders a reason not to visit your site or read its content. If the code needs re-writing it maybe a good time to develop the design of site to gain further search engine optimisation benefits (as mentioned earlier).

Web professionals therefore keep abreast of latest developments in what constitutes best practice. One way they do this is by keeping a close eye on what the internet developer community is reporting, largely by monitoring a number of specialist websites, blogs and forums. If you want to find out more about search engine optimisation and keep informed about latest developments then you would be wise to spend time doing the same. However, much of the information is very technical and is aimed at web developers.

Another place that should be monitored is the World Wide Web Consortium, often known as 'W3C'. This is the place that publishes a great deal of 'best practice' guidance, including things that affect search engine optimisation.

A word of warning!

Sometimes, organisations start from a very weak position when working on various search engine optimisation techniques. That's because some of the technical elements of their site mean that they will never achieve good search results. For example, some structures are random, rather than carefully 'funnelling' search engine spiders to the pages you want to profile.

So although in these notes we have tried to show you plenty of things that anyone can do to improve search performance, it is important to make sure first that your site is built in a way that will support good search results.

Other optimisation activity

As well as the effective use of keywords on your website, there are a number of other activities that can improve your search rankings.

Link building

Search engines love sites that are linked to from lots of other credible websites. It is important therefore that you do what you can to get other sites to link to your own.

Start by thinking about what sites might be relevant, credible and where you can in some way get the site owners to add links to his site. Here are some of the types of site you might consider:

• Customers.
• Suppliers.
• Trade directories.
• Trade associations.
• Industry forums.

Then set about a programme of finding ways to get links to his site. Sometimes you'll be able to call someone who looks after the website, sometimes you may just have to email their webmaster or their general enquiries email address.

You will stand a better chance of getting the link if you can give the site a good reason to do so. In particular, you need to demonstrate that your site has good content that is of relevance to the other site's visitors, such as free articles, white papers and so on.

You should always try to write the link for the site - making sure you include your chosen keywords. That's because search engines look at the words in a link and use them to assess what content is on the page being linked to.

Blogging

Starting a blog can have a very positive impact on your search rankings. It gives you a chance to frequently add new, keyword-rich content to your website. It is also often easier to get other sites to link to your blog than other parts of your site.

One important thing to mention is that your blog should ideally be part of your main website structure. If you start a blog using an online blogging system that isn't properly integrated with your site you might not generate any optimisation advantage from it.

Monitoring and maintenance

You will no doubt want to make sure that all the time and effort you put into your optimisation activity pays off. So it is important to set up a monitoring process. The simplest monitoring is to type the keyword phrases you have chosen into the main search engines, once a week. Maintaining a spreadsheet to track your ranking positions is as essential part of assessing how well you are doing and the overall return on your work.

Once you start to do well for your first group of chosen keywords you can move on to optimise more keywords. But don't forget the first group - just because you get near the top for a phrase doesn't mean you always will be. So you need to keep monitoring and making necessary changes to maintain good ranking positions.

Another essential thing to monitor is various conversion rates. These include how many visitors who find you from a search actually go on to contact you. This is a good point to end on because the most important thing about search engine optimisation is that there is no point attracting lots of new visitors unless enough of them actually go on to become customers.

Presenters' contact details:

Gary Cottam, Doublespark SEO
0845 838 7448
Email here
www.doublespark-seo.co.uk

Richard Groom, Peterborough Copywriting Bureau
01733 391860
richard [at] pcbonline.co.uk
www.pcbonline.co.uk

Leigh Titman, Titman Firth
01733 253934
leigh [at] titmanfirth.com
www.titmanfirth.com

You welcome to download this article in PDF format for your own use and for re-distribution, so long as the PDF remains intact, as is.

RSS Updates

To be advised whenever content is amended to reflect the latest SEO Marketing trends or new content is added to the knowledge base, subscribe to our RSS feed