The Basics Of Search Engine Optimisation

Just why is search engine optimisation (SEO) so important and how can it really help your business?

In part one of our ‘Introduction to Search Engine Marketing’ series; we explained how search engines work. In this guide, we discuss how you can appear in a good position within their search results.

SEO improves your ranking in the natural, organic, non-sponsored listings area of a search engine results page. In order to achieve a high ranking within this space, a website should consider the following three principles:

The site must be designed, coded and hosted in a way that will allow search engine spiders to successfully access and index all relevant site content.
The site’s content must be designed, constructed and written in such a way that appeals to not only the site’s human target audience, but also to the existing search engine algorithms in order for it to be deemed relevant for all possible search terms related to that site.
The site should be ‘endorsed’ by other credible websites as a credible, valuable and authoritative online resource for the site’s relevant industry or subject matter.

These are the three main factors needed to have our website correctly optimised: accessibility, relevancy and credibility. Any website that manages to successfully fulfil the requirements of all three of these principles will be indexed by search engines and appear as a listing somewhere within their search results. However, it is the degree to which this is achieved that will dictate precisely how and where that site will be ranked within the results pages. In short, the higher the degree of conformity to these principles, the higher your site will rank. So how do you best implement these three principles within a website for maximum search engine exposure?

Accessibility

Regardless of the quality of a website’s content, how well it has been designed, or the reputation that it enjoys offline, in order to appeal to the 80% of all internet users who regularly use search engines, and the average 20% of all website referrals that are generated by them, a search engine optimisation campaign will need to ensure that the website can easily be accessed by a search engine spider. If site access to search engines is prevented or blocked, it will prove impossible to achieve a rank in the top 1,000,000 search engine results, let alone the top ten. Although continually evolving, most search engine spiders are still primitive software programmes that have difficulty following anything other than fairly simple HTML code. Because of this, certain commonly used design and code elements such as Flash files, frames, JavaScript and certain URL structures generated by content management systems can prevent a search engine from accessing and indexing a website.

The main challenge of a search engine optimisation programme therefore is to find a balance between providing unhindered access to the site and its content to search engines whilst retaining the aesthetic qualities, usability and functionality that human users need and appreciate.

The main factors that commonly prevent or limit site access by search engine spiders can be grouped into four main areas:

1. Domain-level accessibility

A number of factors can be responsible for search engines being unaware that a website exists. These include circumstances where a site:

Is newly published online
Has never been submitted to search engines for review
Does not receive any inbound links from other websites
Has recently changed server / URL structures or file names
Has largely altered or added to existing content
Was ‘offline’ when a search engine spider attempted to access the site

When a search engine is unaware of a website’s presence, there can be no interaction between the search engine spider and the website’s content. For this reason, the website cannot be crawled, indexed or displayed as a listing on a search engine in response to a search query.

2. Content -level accessibility

Many websites have a huge amount of data, for example a travel agency website would have information on thousands of hotels, the facilities they offer, where they are located, their prices, and more. It’s imperative that this data is found by search engine spiders as it would result in thousands of new pages that could potentially rank for specific search terms and capture qualified leads. However, it is often the case that this data can only be found by filling out a form, using a drop-down box, or signing in with a login and password. The problem here is that search engine spiders cannot fill out forms, cannot log in, and can even refuse to utilise drop-downs and other navigation (if they’re built incorrectly).

A site must proactively ensure that this content is served to spiders in a way and format that allows them to commit a record of that data into the search engine’s databases.

3. Page-level accessibility

Even when search engines are aware of a site’s online presence, there may be technical factors which can impair a spider’s ability to access web pages and therefore index site content. These problems are usually a consequence of the technical setup of a website and/or hosting arrangements and will frequently include issues such as page size, URL construction, web server or CMS set up, secure socket layers and the use of files or meta data designed to manage the behaviour of web browsers and search engines. If not implemented with due care, many of these technologies can prevent or altogether deny page access to search engine spiders.

4. Navigational accessibility

Search engine spiders crawl and index a site’s content by following the links that they find between pages. This means that a site’s internal linking structure effectively provides a ‘road map’ to content for both people and search engines. Because of this, the precise arrangement and design of your site’s link structure, also known as the site’s crawl path, needs to be carefully considered in order to ensure that search engine spiders have an easy route to all the content they desire.

Certain types of linking formats will generate a crawl path that spiders have difficulty following; worse still, some link designs effectively block search engine spiders from accessing site content altogether. Several common website design techniques and technologies (such as the use of framesets, flash animations, CGI, JavaScript, image maps and pop-up windows) will also greatly inhibit a site’s crawl path and thus its level of search engine indexation. The failure to provide an effective crawl path in your site can prove to be detrimental to the ranking of pages already indexed by search engines, and to the website as a whole. Providing a search engine with evidence of a coherent hierarchical link structure, qualitative site content and quantitative site depth will help to develop your site’s credibility and relevancy in the eyes of search engines, thus helping it to rank above competitors.

There are a huge number of potential configurations or problems with websites that could lead to any of those four Accessibility problems.

Relevancy

Whereas the issue of accessibility is concerned with getting a website indexed by search engines, relevancy is concerned with a website’s ranking within search engine results. A website may have been accessed, crawled and indexed by a search engine, but this does not mean that the content of the site is considered relevant enough by search engines to result in the site’s high ranking for a particular search query. More often than not, when someone performs a search query, they will be served with hundreds of thousands of web page results - all of which the search engine has concluded are relevant for that query. As such, each of these web pages can be considered to be competing (whether proactively or not) for that specific search phrase.

For example, a search for the term “web designer in London” in Google.co.uk returns tens of millions web pages. This means that for a London-based web designer to achieve a first page ranking on Google for the words “web designer in London” the site will need to justify that it is the most relevant site for that keyword out of that potential pool of millions of competitors. Doing so will entail ensuring that the criteria search engines use to measure your site’s relevancy are met more effectively than in any one of the millions of other websites competing with it.

To be relevant you need to make sure that you first select which search phrases you want to target and reflect the page-level requirements of the search engines:

1. Selecting target phrases

Search engine marketing assumes a thorough knowledge of your target market demographics. If you know who your target market is, what they are searching for, and how they are conducting those searches, you can make sure your website is relevant for those terms – thus helping your site rank highly on search engines for those phrases. The first step on the road to identifying the phrases your potential customers are likely to use is to research and compile a list of search terms that are relevant to your site (and therefore business). These terms should also have a high search volume – i.e. they should be typed into search engines often and by a large enough number of people.

Selecting keywords relevant to your business that have a high search volume will ensure that any successful search engine optimisation effort will yield not just targeted traffic, but large volumes of it. The higher the volume of traffic is, the higher the chance of a site conversion, whether that means a sale, enquiry or newsletter sign- up.

2. Search engine algorithms

In order to discern relevancy of websites for certain keywords and where they should rank in comparison to each other, search engines apply algorithms to their set of indexed pages. Unsurprisingly, in order to guard against any unwanted manipulation, search engines are notoriously slow in coming forward with an explanation of how their search engine algorithms rank sites. Furthermore, the criteria that search engine algorithms employ to rank a website vary from engine to engine. However, all major search engines will measure the presence and content of the following elements to a greater or lesser degree:

On-page text

In order for a search engine to conclude that a betting website is a relevant and authoritative source of information for gambling, betting, sports and related information, it needs to recognise that there is sufficient on-page text related to all those subjects.

In particular, search engines tend to place more importance on interpreting the text found in the following areas of an HTML page:

Page titles
Alt tags and heading tags
Visible page text and text formatting

If a webpage’s overall content is weighted heavily towards elements such as graphic images, embedded flash movies and JavaScript navigation instead of on-page text, then, more often than not, the site will be overlooked by search engine spiders in favour of more talkative websites - thus making it very difficult to rank well for any competitive keywords. In order to rectify these problems, the right balance between the order, position, content and amount of on-page text within these elements needs to be successfully achieved.

Link anchor text

Many search engines index the content of a site’s internal text links and use their content as a factor when determining where a site should rank. Text based links therefore represent an ideal opportunity to improve your site’s search engine rankings by using keyword-rich text within the link itself.

Internal linking

The footer of your website provides a valuable area in which to include text links to key website content. For example, if you would like to drive highly targeted traffic to a specific page, a link could be included in the footer area of the site with anchor text that matches the highest search volumes for that specific area. That way the site architecture is communicating to the search engines that those pages are important and puts them into a useful context.

The presence of a site map link within a website’s footer area is considered good practice too, as this provides an additional crawl path for search engine spiders to navigate along. The specific problems associated with the issue of relevancy relate directly to the presence, coding and content of these page attributes. By analysing the specific location, density and proximity of keywords within these page elements as well as analysing the internal linking structure of the site, the overall relevancy of a site can be ascertained.

Achieving the correct balance where the content of these elements appeals to both search engines and users alike can often prove to be quite a challenge. However, the needs of your site users and search engine spiders are not necessarily incompatible. With careful consideration, a site can be constructed in a way that adheres to both the spidering requirements of search engines and good usability for human users.

Credibility

Once a search engine has determined the relevancy of your website to a particular topic, it needs confirmation of this relevancy from external sources in order for the site to achieve a high ranking. This is known as credibility. A website’s credibility is largely determined by both the quantity and quality of the links that point to it from other websites (that is, as long as these websites are already successfully indexed by a search engine). This is due to the fact that many search engines view each inbound link that points to a site as a third party passing a vote of confidence for that website.

Because the casting of these “votes” is essentially a democratic action (other website editors have free will and are responsible for ensuring that the content of their site is both relevant and accurate), they can be recorded by search engines and used as a key indication of a site’s online credibility. Therefore, as an example, the more “votes” your website receives in the form of other sites linking to it, the higher it will rank within a search engine’s results. PageRank is a score (unknown-10) given by Google to a website based on this number and quality of links (or “votes”) that point to it from other websites.

That said, it is not just the quantity of inbound links that Google uses to assess the credibility of your site; the quality of the links also plays a critical factor. Search engines assess the quality of the sites that link to a website as an important indicator of the quality of that destination site. For example, when www.bbc.co.uk links towww.direct.gov.uk, search engines such as Google interpret this as “The BBC thinks that the Open Government site is worth linking to, therefore it must be of a high quality”. Google believes the BBC’s assertion because the BBC site has a high PageRank itself. Google then tops up www.direct.gov.uk’s PageRank accordingly, resulting in higher search engine positions for the Open Government site.

In the sports sector for example, a site such as www.espn.com could be considered an authoritative related source. This is because it is a well known brand in its industry, provides useful information and is an authority in its area. Google has awarded it a PageRank of 8 out of a possible 10 in recognition of this. If www.espn.com linked to another sports site, Google would think that the linked-to site is worth linking to and would top up its PageRank accordingly, resulting in a ranking improvement. To discern even further how valuable and authoritative a site is search engines use keywords within a link and on a page to contextualise and therefore categorise sites according to their subject matter. From the example above, if the BBC site links to the UK Government site with the words “UK Government’”, this association is added to Google’s database. Then, when a user types in “UK Government” into Google, Google can discern that the phrase “UK government” is relevant to the open Government site. Therefore it follows that if someone were to enter “UK government” into a search engine, www.direct.gov.uk would appear as a relevant result.

In short, in order to appear credible to a search engine, a web site not only needs an amount of inbound links to help raise its PageRank (and thus its search engine rankings) but ideally will need these links to be “keyword-anchored” - that is to say constructed using keywords for which the site would appear to be credible.

In our next guide and the last of our three-part series, Introduction to Search Engine Marketing, titled ‘PPC management basics’, we will explain the essentials of PPC, including the elements of a campaign so that you can start to manage your own.