Like it or not, whether it is the bane of your life or the love of your life, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) cannot be avoided. So, why is it so important? Well, if Google can’t find your website, then how do you think we can! Statistic results from March 2015 show that Google is still dominating the UK Search market share, making it the most used search engine;

(Source adapted from The E Word, 2015)

Now, as a person who has their own website, it should be your golden dream to be on page one of Google – and you can be! Imagine SEO as your yellow brick road to achieving your golden dream! Boutet and Quoniam (2012) explain that by optimising your website, you are increasing your websites visibility and improving your search engine ranking, which means your website, will get more valuable, targeted traffic (people).

Boutet and Quoniam (2012) reinforce the importance of being on the first page of Google – a person seeking information cannot equally value all the results provided by the search engine. Why? Well, it’s simple – you don’t review every single result that Google offers and if you do… you have way too much time on your hands. In fact, most people (myself included) limit their search to just the first few pages. Therefore, having your website on the first page of Google gives your website a sense of ‘legitimacy’. As users of the internet, we trust Googles judgement, we wouldn’t think “hang on Google is tricking me here… it’s giving me the wrong information” No! We see Google as our information providing guru, but that doesn’t always mean Google has got it right. If a website does not have an effective SEO strategy, google may not rank this website highly. Therefore it is imperative in today’s society that your website ticks all the right boxes…

Think of Google (or any search engine) as a recipe. Does your website have the correct ingredients for Google’s recipe? If it does, Google is going to really like your website, in fact the finer the ingredients, the more google will like you – the more Google likes you, the higher they will rank your website on their search engine page. After all, Google only wants to give the best, most relevant information to its users. The big problem is; nobody is 100% sure on the exact ingredients that Google is looking for and if you ever manage to find them out, my friend THAT is worth more than gold! But, for now, we all know the basic ingredients; Milk, Butter & Sugar. In SEO terms, we know that a search engines algorithm is based on key principals; content, keywords, HTML, architecture of the site, links, reputation, and trust (Sullivan, 2013).

(Source adapted from Vertical Response, 2013)

Great, so let’s take a closer look at how you can develop a good SEO strategy and become that one step closer to appearing on the first page of Google!

SEO boils down to two key parts; on the page SEO and off the page SEO – You can’t have one without the other – there is no Ying without Yang. Sullivan (2013) has broken SEO down into a periodical table to show the key factors – what I have been referring to as ingredients – needed to achieve success, i.e.- make it onto the first page of Google;

(Source adapted from Sullivan, 2013)

 On-the-page SEO consists of all the edits / changes that you make to the code and content of the actual web page – might sound obvious, but I just wanted to clarify, such as:

• High quality, relevant content – People don’t want to be misled –clicking on a website that you believe is going to give you more information about Staffordshire Bullterriers, only to find it is all about Sphynx cats is a no-no!
• Titles and descriptions that contain your key words (this is the HTML side of things)
• Proper URL Structures  (This is also to do with HTML)– Which one do you think is properly structured:

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

OR

http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1

• Relevant internal links – if you are giving a link to another page on the same domain, make sure it is relevant to your content.
• Text Formatting (use of h1, h2, bold etc.) – make use of the different text formats available to you and if you can, use your keywords in the h1 format.
• Image optimization (image size, proper image names, use of ALT tag)
• Navigation – people need to find your site user friendly, make use of HTML sitemaps and breadcrumbs and remember that Googles little robots need to be able to crawl your site easily too!
• Fast loading pages – nobody wants to be hanging around waiting for a page to load!
• External links – You don’t want any broken links in your content or links that take you to an irrelevant website / web page.

Off-the-page SEO refers to the outside activities that you do in order to get your website seen, after all Google wants to know how the rest of the world perceives your website too! These outside activities include;

• Link Building – Key thing to remember here is QUALITY over QUANTITY! You want other websites / blogs to reference (link) to your page as this is telling Google that your page has relevant, quality content. A good, highly valuable link for example would be from an ac.uk source – i.e. a university as Google sees these as highly valuable links. After all, if a University wants to reference (link) your website then you must have something relevant / important!
• Social Media – Although not a direct SEO technique as search engine don’t count these links, the main point here is that your social media profile can increase your website exposure as the more people you connect with and engage with, the more likely they will check out your website – hey! Every little helps, right?
• Trust – Google needs to trust your site, you need to have respectable “neighbourhood” links, and good reviews on your website will also go a long way. Trust can be built through having highly relevant content and useful information as naturally this would generate good reviews and welcome respectable referencing (links) from other websites.

There is so much to read up on SEO, so please if you are interested I highly recommend Sullivan’s take on SEO and the periodic table and you can read up more about it here. It really is fascinating stuff, but I hope for now you get the basics!

If you are looking to build a website or implement an SEO strategy, I wish you all the luck and remember – be patient, this takes time, but when it starts to pay off, you will realise it was all worth it!

References:

Boutet, C. & Quoiniam, L. (2012) ‘Towards Active SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)’. Journal of Information Systems and Technology Management, [Online] Vol 9 (Issue 6) pp453-458. <http://www.jistem.fea.usp.br/index.php/jistem/issue/view/55> [accessed 21 April 2015]

Sullivan, D. (2013) ‘Updated: The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors’. [Online] <http://searchengineland.com/now-updated-the-periodic-table-of-seo-success-factors-162513> [accessed 21 April 2015]

The E Word (2015) ‘Search Engine Market’. [Online] <http://theeword.co.uk/info/search_engine_market/> [accessed 21 April 2015]

Vertical Response (2013) ‘The Ingredients to Tasty Search Engine Optimization’. [Online] <http://www.verticalresponse.com/blog/the-ingredients-to-tasty-seo/> [accessed 21 April 2015]