Intrinsic Marketing Expert Article

Search Engine Optimisation Introduction

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) is alternatively known as Internet Marketing or Online Marketing or Website Promotion Services or Website Ranking Services, they all mean the same thing: getting your website to rank highly for searches that people enter into Search Engines without paying for it. Take a look at Google say, and we're talking about the main list in the centre, and not the sponsored links down the right, or sometimes along the top. Some people call this "organic listings" or "organic search results". The aim of the game is straight forward, when your potential customer searches for "Widget X5000", if you sell them, you want your website to be the first result they see.

But how do you go about getting that coveted #1 ranking for Widget X5000? To answer that, you need to know how the search engines work, or more specifically, how they decide that your website is "better" than your competitors for that keyword. In essence, this can be broken down to three steps:

• Does the search engine know your website exists?
• Has your web page got anything to do with Widget X5000's?
• How many other websites on the internet think that your website is important?

The first sounds trivial, but isn't always. How do you get your brand new website on the search engines radar? Search engines crawl the internet be following links on websites, if no one is linking to your new site, they will never stumble upon it. You can submit your website to the search engines directly to tell them you exist, but they deprioritise this kind of input, so it can take up to 3 months for them to decide to visit. It's also laborious, did you know there are over 140 search engines at last count? Worse than that though, just because a search engine came to look, doesn't even mean they will necessarily add your website to their index. In an ideal world search engines would just find you by following links to your site, but in reality this could also take months.

One key theme of promoting your website is this: there is no silver bullet, there is no one thing that you should do to the exclusion of all others. Just like financial investments, if you don't want to crash and burn, the best strategy is a balanced portfolio. For Search Engine Optimisation, submission to search engines is a useful tool to get you in the search engine indexes, because if they don't know your website exists, they can never show you. But it will not get you to that #1 slot.

The second step is what's called On-site Optimisation. It's how relevant your page is to the search term. Does your web page have "Widget X5000" in the Title, or in the description? What about titles on your page, and bullet points? How many times does the phrase "Widget X5000" appear on your page as a percentage of total? Is it 1% or 10%? These factors are used by the search engines to decide how optimised your web page is and hence how important it is. All other things being equal, if it comes down to the search engine deciding which search engine optimised website to rank #1, your website or your competitors, and your website has "Widget X5000" in the title and your competitors doesn't.... which do you think the search engine will rank #1?

In the above example, the search engines use on-site Search Engine Optimization it to work out who to rank where with respect to each other. But to get to that point, the search engine must have already decided that you are a website worthy of ranking. That happens by reputation, and reputation is gauged by how many other websites link to yours. This is called Off-Site Optimisation and is our third step. Not all links are created equally either, there are several factors when it comes to links:

• Source Website Reputation - How "important" is the website linking to you? Do you think that a link from www.microsoft.com is more important than a link from your personal blog (diary) site?
• Source Website Relevance - If the website that links to you is search engine optimised well for "Widget X5000" then that's better than a link from Tracey's Knitting Circle website.
• Quantity - how many websites link to yours, although this is the least important factor.
• Link Text or Anchor Text - What does the link say on their web page? Does it say: www.your-site.com or Buy your Widget X5000 here ? Which do you think is better if you want to rank highly for "Widget X5000"?

Let's pretend you sell Apple Mac computers, what would be the perfect link? How about a link from www.apple.com's home page that says "Buy your Apple Macs here"? It's a site that has massive reputation, is very relevant and links to your site including the phrase "Apple Mac", which we'll assume you want to rank for if you sell them!

Great, we've found a magic bullet that will shoot you to that #1 slot, right? No! Sure, having that link would give you a massive boost and might even do it, but it's not the only story. Remember, a balanced portfolio. Here's an exercise for your, search google for "Click Here". The number 1 site is the Adobe Acrobat Reader download page and yet the phrase "Click Here" doesn't appear on that page anywhere and the page has nothing to do with "Click Here". So why is it #1? Because over a million web sites link to that download page, with the words "Click Here" as the text of the link!

As you can see, there are many factors to optimising your site to get high rankings in the search engines. I've really only scratched the surface here and not even mentioned a critical early step of how to scientifically check whether your are even optimising for the correct search keywords and key phrases. You could spend months ranking for "Widget X5000" and yet get no traffic, only to discover after wasting time and money that actually your prospective clients are searching in droves for "Widget 6000Y". There are specific techniques to ensure you are using the best keywords and keyphrases, and you're on to a hiding to nothing if you don't do it up front.

If you'd like to start the process of ranking well for your search terms, then sign up here today for a Search Engine Ranking Report