SEO Primer

I often get asked by clients why their sites aren't at the top of page one of Google for a certain word or phrase. The answer to this question is not desperately straight forward so I felt a blog post outlining the general principles of search engine optimisation (SEO) and how it all fits together.

Overview
Search engines use automated programs to read web pages that they already have in their system, they then follow all the links on those pages to read further pages where they will again follow all the links and so on. The search engine then puts the information about each page into a big database including all the text on that page and which other pages link to and from it in order to work out how relevant each page is.

Each search engine has its own systems and algorithms to work out the relevance of each site but it boils down to two main elements, one is the content on each page and the other is how many other sites link to your page.

Content
The content of your pages is the first port of call for your site, unique, well written, relevant content will always rank well regardless of anything else. If you want to be found for the term 'candle shop' you need to have those words on your page, it is no use writing about 'the flammable ambient lighting solution outlet' if you want to be found for 'candle shop'. The search engines are clever enough to work out how important you think each phrase is by where it is on the page, so if the phrase 'Candle Shop' is in big letters at the top of your page (in an H1 tag ideally) this will help, but it would also be good to repeat this phrase a few times within the copy of the page to reinforce the fact that that is what the page is about. To achieve this you would want a few short, relevant and unique (see unique below) paragraphs about your shop including any phrases you wish to target.

Links
The other core element for SEO is the links to your pages (so links on other sites that point to yours). Why is this important? The reason is that the search engines use this to work out how important other sites think yours is, so the more links to your site, the more important it appears. For instance if I create a new site and no one has ever linked to it, the search engines can only go on the content of your site, which can only be optimised so far, therefore your site won't do as well as anyone else with similar content but a lot of inbound links.

Each 'inbound link' adds weight to your site but not all inbound links are made equal. A link from your cousin's blog doesn't mean a lot to the search engines, it doesn't appear to be that relevant to your site so it doesn't help that much. However if you managed to get a link from the BBC site to your candle shop website then the search engines would sit up and take notice as the BBC site is rated very highly, this one link would help enormously.

A popular practice of reciprocal links (if you link to me, I'll link to you) has died out recently as search engines spotted the trend and have thus reduce the weight of these reciprocal links. There are also sites that just do linking for SEO purposes, however these are now frowned upon and probably won't help you.

Ideally you just want links from related and well rated sites. Examples would be from suppliers, big customers, any associations your company belongs to, local business directories, news websites, industry relevant blogs and anything you can think of that would be relevant to your site.

Other
There are further things one can do to boost page rankings, such as having keyword rich URLs, unique and relevant meta title tags on each page,  fast loading pages etc, all of which we try and build into the sites we make so you just have to worry about the content and links for your business.

Where to go from here
So, you've managed to get some links to your site, you've written the best content in the world but you're still not at the top of the search engines, what do you do? There are many SEO companies out there who can help you to further optimise your content, build links for you, write further unique content for you and generally improve your site's ranking on Google. Ideally check for referrals from other companies before employing anyone and I am happy to recommend a few companies that my clients have used to some success.

Happy SEOing!