Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is often referred to as the group of online marketing activities used to enhance or improve the chances of a website being shown among the top results of organic listings within a major search engine (when an appropriate search is undertaken.) These techniques primarily involve link and website content/structure strategies leveraging off targeted keywords (and phrases.)

The fundamentals of SEO have not changed much over the years. If anything, the cleverer major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask get with the way they index and retrieve website content... the more relevant the so called 'basics' of SEO have become.

In simple terms, SEO involves modifying your websites various pages (and associated content, images, video footage etc...) to ensure that the major search engines index them appropriately against keywords and phrases relevant to your industry, products/services, individual web-page goals etc.

When considering embarking on modifying your website for SEO, there are 2 key things to address... namely Page(s) Content and the relative importance of your website against your competitors.

For Google your sites 'importance' is referred to as PageRank... all of the major search engines employ a similar construct to 'rank' sites.

Given the dominance of Google amongst the major search engines, with more than 70% of all searches conducted using Google in most regions, we will focus our SEO efforts on how to best set up/modify your site to improve your standing with them.

Importantly as mentioned above, most of Google's competitors employ similar indexing and ranking methods to Google... enough so that the advice to follow will help improve the performance of your website with all the major search engines... not just Google.

1.    Content.

Your sites content tells the search engine how to treat your pages when someone goes into a search engine looking/searching for sites like yours.

The fundamentals here are to research the various keywords/phrases that are appropriate to your site and then modify your sites content appropriately. The 2 best sources here are your competitors websites and your current SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaigns.

2.    PageRank.

PageRank is a number between 0 and 10 that Google assigns a page within a website that tells Google how important that site is... 0 being not important... 10 being most important. This scale is logarithmic so there are millions of sites at the lower numbers... very few at 8 and 9 and fewer still at 10.

PageRank is a moving feast so far as how it works but essentially it rewards a higher number to websites/pages that appear to be authoritative and relevant for the space they operate in and have lots of similarly authoritative sites linking to it (many people will tell you its about the volume of websites linking to you but these days the 'quality' and 'relevance' of sites linking to you is more important than quantity alone.)

To check on your sites PageRank (or individual pages PageRank) go here...

http://pr.blogflux.com/index.php

(There are plenty of other websites that do this and even toolbars that automate the process of telling you the PageRank for each and every web page you visit... this particular site however has been around for sometime and I find it very straightforward to use.)

When a user goes to Google and types in a keyword or phrase,web sites/pages are basically returned in order of the most relevant (content) combined with highest PageRank. Importantly, the power of PageRank can mean that a site that you may see as not as relevant as yours, may rank higher in Google if they have a better PageRank.

Equally a high PageRank site with poor keyword relevance/optimisation may rank lower than yours. The combination is what counts.

How do you do it... that is optimize your website to get more traffic from the major search engines like Google?

Despite what many of the 'experts' will tell you (or more appropriately try and sell you) about SEO, most of it comes down to some very simple rules... especially for most websites operating in local, foreign or niche markets.

Paid/3rd party SEO help can be useful in highly competitive online verticals in large, established markets such as Travel, Real Estate and Classifieds in the US, where an incremental improvement can deliver a substantial boost in marketing ROI.

If that refers to your business, and you therefore are considering using a 3rd party to help with your SEO efforts, ensure that what ever work they provide does not require your continual, ongoing payment to continue receiving the benefits of their work.

Also ensure that they are reputable (seek references of their work) and do not employ so called 'black hat' SEO techniques (sometime these black hat techniques can harm your efforts leaving you in a worse position than before you hired outside help.)

Lastly, before you commit to paid SEO, negotiate minimum targets that you want to achieve from their efforts (ie a minimum increase of 'X' unique visitors per month) and ensure that part of their payment is tied to reaching these minimum targets.

OK... here are the basics of SEO...

As mentioned above you need to address 2 key areas... Site Content and Page Rank.

1.    Content.

First you should research the most relevant keywords and phrases for your site... and your sites pages... that is to find keywords and/or phrases that you believe people looking for your products and/or services would use to find your products and/or services.

As above, the 2 best sources for mine are your competitors websites (here you can learn what words/phrases work... and more importantly 'how' they work)... and your SEM campaign (I will cover SEM... Search Engine Marketing... in a separate post.)

On your competitors websites... do a search in Google for some of the keywords and phrases that you think are appropriate for your space.

Note the websites in your space (your competitors) that seem to appear often near the top of the results for these terms.

Once you have these sites, review them noting keywords and phrases that appear often amongst the pages Title, Navigation, Headings and Body Copy. Importantly, the most relevant terms are usually nearer the top of the page... and/or to the left of any given area/sentence. (Look also at Image Names and Alt Tags if you really want to go deeper on this.)

So when reviewing someone's Page Title for example, pay special attention to the first word, then the 2nd, then the 3rd etc... in any given area. Same would apply to reviewing Navigation (menus), Headings and/or Body Copy.

As I said earlier... the basics of SEO come down to some very simple rules... one key rule in fact.

The fundamentals here are selecting the right words (relevance), for the right location on the page (position), the right number of times (frequency.)

The content element of SEO therefore = Relevance + Position + Frequency.

Lets say you were an online marketing business specializing in SEO and SEM located in Australia... and the top 3 keywords/terms you wanted to be found by (note 'wanted to be found by' not necessarily the most popular terms) were 'Online Marketing Australia', 'Search Engine Optimisation' and 'Search Engine Marketing'... then your 'Page Title' may read something like this...

"Online Marketing Australia, Search Engine Optimisation & Search Engine Marketing. Australia's SEO and SEM experts... Marketing Magic Melbourne" (Note: in some industries you can get rewarded for repetition (within reason) within key areas like the pages 'Title'.)

In the above example I have used the word marketing 3 times and Australia twice... and referred to Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing by the full terms and their associated acronyms (SEO and SEM.)

Importantly however the above doesn't 'look' like it has been written purely for the search engines. Any content you place on your pages needs to both be appropriate for search engine indexing and ranking... and also be readable.

Overly optimising your sites content can have the reverse effect both turning off users and in some cases, flagging the site as inappropriate and cause your position (ranking) within the search engines to fall. In some cases it may even get your site removed from the search engines index altogether so it is important to strike the right balance when reviewing and re-writing your content.

One other thing to note in the above example was that I included the company name, 'Marketing Magic Melbourne', at the end of the optimised sentence. This was done deliberately as while the company name is important, important enough to include in the title for sure, in the main people that will 'find' your website in a search engine are more likely to be searching for terms related to your industry and not your company name.

You would assume that people already familiar with your business would already know how to find your website be it from memory... or by simply typing in <company name> followed by '.com' (or .com.au for Australian websites, .co.uk for UK wesbites etc...)

If you were looking for Adidas as an example... many people would first try 'Adidas.com'... or type in 'Adidas' into a search engine... and not try looking for them specifically by typing in 'sportswear' or 'jogging shoes'.

OK...

This content creation methodology, as shown in the Page Title example above, works for all page content, not just the stuff you can see. You need to ensure keywords/phrases are built into Meta Tags, Alt Tags, Image Names, Links etc...

After getting your sites Page Title's right... you should next focus on the naming of the various pages (and then move to Headings, Body Content, Image Naming, Meta Tags etc...)

Here you focus on including your company name and key words and phrases within each pages URL.

As an example...
 
Home               www.YourBusiness.com
About               www.YourBusiness.com/about/Your_Business_about.html
Product            www.YourBusiness.com/Product_Parent/Product_Your_Business.html

For the Product line above... if you were a hardware store selling 'gum boots' (as a sub set of a 'safety wear' category) then it might look like this...

                        www.HardwareStoreBrand.com/safety_wear/gum_boots.html

When it comes to Image Names and Alt Tags... its pretty straight forward.

Again using the hardware example above... an image named gum_boots.gif will help your optimisation efforts much more than image1.gif or 11234333.gif. Equally, an Alt Tag of 'Gum Boots' will work better for you than no Alt Tag at all (remembering of course not to over do the inclusion of any keyword or phrase on a page.)
 
Another great source of keywords and phrases for your SEO efforts can be found within your SEM campaign (assuming you are running one)... that is your Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing online advertising campaigns.

A well executed SEM campaign will have a large list of keywords and phrases ranging from the broad to the long tail.

Of the 100's... if not 1000's (or 10's of 1000's) of keywords and phrases used in your campaign, a small group will deliver most of the paid clicks to your site.

Importantly, both Yahoo and Google's online advertising platforms allow you to measure the performance of your campaign... right down to what elements of your campaign actually delivered an 'action' (be it an e-commerce sale, a click-to-call enquiry or a completed online subscription.)

From this 'ranked' information you can determine what keywords and phrases are working best on the 'paid' side... and use this information to build out the SEO side (or 'free' side.)

Most importantly you should focus on what has 'converted' best (on whatever conversion metrics are appropriate for your site) within your SEM campaign and not just on what delivered the most visitors.

2.    PageRank.

Wikipedia defines it as such...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagerank

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

A higher PageRank is usually given to a site that has a lot of other websites linking to it but as above... a smaller number of more authoritative sites linking to yours can be more effective.

With the relentless efforts of people trying to game the system (and the efforts of 'black hat' SEO's)... Google focuses far more these days on the quality and relevance of sites linking to you than the quantity.

So for example, a highly relevant, high quality (and high PageRank) site linking to you appropriately (that is with the link in text using keywords relevant to the page being linked to) could be worth more than 10's if not 100's of unrelated, low quality (and low PageRank) sites linking to you.

Several ways to research appropriate 'targets' for linking to you.

• Research sites currently linking to you and either a) approach them to improve the 'relevance' of the link (such as the text used within the link itself) and/or b) seek out similar sites to those already linking to you. Visit here to learn more of the sites currently linking to you... ie for this new blog... http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=blog.whodeani.com&btnG=Search
• Use competitive analysis tools like Hitwise, Nielsen, Compete, Alexa and Comscore to research leading sites in your space and the sites linking to them. You could also simply enter your competitors URL's into the Google link just mentioned above.
• SEM research. Get a feel for the types of users being delivered to your site by the terms being used to find you. Look for sites that may not be in the same space but may share a similar audience.
• Analytics. Review your current analytics to see where you are getting traffic from. Again, speak with those currently linking to you to improve the 'relevancy'... look at other sources for 'clues' as to the types of other sites you can approach.

Its worth repeating that this post is very much about the basics of SEO. As I said earlier... there are certain verticals, niches and regions whereby achieving a significant improvement in the performance of your site with the major search engines will require the assistance of a 3rd party... BUT it has been my experience that most of the benefit you can gain from SEO... for most types of web based businesses can be had through following the simple rules of this post.

I was going to talk more about Search Engine Marketing (and its connection to SEO) in this post however its pretty long as is.

Will provide more information on SEM in a separate post.

One last thing... if your looking to improve the performance of your site through Search Engine Optimisation, I would recomend you get your broader marketing efforts in check first. I wrote about some of the things you should look at in a previous post called 'The 4 Pillars of Measurable Marketing'.