Search Engine Optimisation tips
Search engine optimisation (SEO) can involve a lot of technical knowledge. This fourth set of tips describes what SEO is, and offers some useful advice.
The aim of the search engines is to return the most useful and relevant results to their users so that they will continue to use the search engine. (A more cynical person might say the aim of search engines is to make money, and they would be right, but this effectively leads to the same conclusion - they make money by having the most users.)
The aim of SEOs is to promote their website, or clients' websites to the top of the search engine results. But this doesn't necessarily mean there need be tension between the two. Indeed, with paid inclusion and PPC ads there is a large degree of interdependence between search engines and SEOs. "Ethical" or approved SEO techniques can achieve great results for the website owner, search engine, and internet user.
Content is King
While the density of keywords is important, these days there is much more to content than this. The following are factors that some search engines may use in their algorithms to rank pages; remember that the algorithms are constantly updated, and fiercely guarded, so these are a merely a guide:
- Regularity with which new content is added. As a general rule, the more frequently the content is updated, the better. Some sites maintain a weblog, or post press releases and news updates regularly on their site in order to keep creating fresh content.
- Uniqueness of content
- Related terms in the content - terms that the search engine thinks are related to the main content of the page
- Negative rankings for illegal or unsafe content
- Quality of HTML coding, and compliance with W3C standards
Off-Page Factors
With the arrival of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's PageRank system in the late 1990s, the way search engines ranked their pages began to take a whole range of off-page factors into account. Off-page factors are any features, not on the actual webpage, that affect its rank.
Google's original PageRank system regarded the backlinks (incoming links) to a website as "votes" for that website. So, a page with more links to it was regarded as more important.
Off-page factors have evolved to form complex parts of search engines' algorithms, but some of the most important factors include:
- Age of the backlink, and the reputation of the linking site
- The anchor text in the backlink, and its relevancy to the search term
- Rate of acquisition (too fast might indicate unnatural link buying), and rate of removal of backlinks
- Use of the "no-follow" tag to tell a search engine's spider not follow the link
Understanding Search Engine Rankings
Knowing your target market is important, as the following experiment shows. We searched for the term 'flowers' on various versions of Google, and tracked the rankings of two Australian online flower shops, with the following results:
| Website | Google.com.au (pages from Aus) | Google.com.au (the web) | Google.com | Google.co.uk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Easy Flowers Australia | 1 | 8 | 171 | 209 |
| Fast Flowers | 16 | 341 | ? | 472 |
As you can see, saying "I want to rank number 1 on Google" is not enough. Which Google? In which market?
Other Factors in Search Engine Rankings
Again, this is just a guide, but some other ranking factors include:
- Data collected by the search engine, such as click-through rates, monitoring how frequently users press the back button after clicking through to a site, and toolbar data
- Hosting service, including the quality of other sites hosted on the same IP, and factors like hosting up time
- Hand ranking by humans
- Negative scoring for activities like cloaking, keyword stuffing, link farms, and spamdexing