16 June 2010
As an experienced SEO practitioner I go to meetings on a regular basis during which I am required to explain precisely what search engine optimisation is and how it can benefit this particular client. Having to attend meetings can be time consuming and this is time that could be spent working on other projects. However this is part and parcel of my business and unless I can explain fully what SEO is and its benefits I couldn’t possibly get any new business.

I have decided to write an article explaining just that. So not only will this benefit me but also other SEOs out there. Hopefully I can get all of this across in one article and provide answers to the major questions that I face on a daily basis. Although my initial intention was to put together an article which took a ‘question and answer’ form, on reflection it seems that a more flowing discussion is likely to be more effective.

Before I begin I would like to point out that SEO isn’t something that can simply be built into your website when it’s being built. I do agree that during a website build you can make your site SEO friendly although on site SEO probably only accounts for approximately 35% of what is required, as today much of the really clever stuff happens off site but ill get into that later. If this article still doesn’t convince you check out our first class testimonial for Bathshop321.

Search Engine Underlying Principle

To define it concisely; Search engine optimisation or (SEO) is the science of helping a website to achieve higher rankings in the search engines for a chosen set of keywords. This is how I generally define the discipline during the course of general conversation when it turns to questions about what I do for a living. During a business meeting it is obviously vital to go into a considerably more detailed explanation. So I’ll start at the beginning and break each element of my initial statement down.

There is no point in having a website if nobody is going to see it. By creating a website you are saying to everybody out there “Hi! I’ve got something that I want to share with you.” People still believe that online success is as simple as getting a website built and waiting for people to flock in en masse. Unfortunately most areas of the internet are heavily competitive so unless you do actively do something to your website it is unlikely that many if any people will ever see it.

Search Engines

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are portals for people to find websites based upon their interests or a specific query. The job of these search engines is to provide the searcher with the best possible websites dependant on what the searcher has requested. What I mean by this is, if you typed in ‘Office Supplies’, then you would expect to see a list of websites with a focus on office supplies. Now here’s where it gets a little bit more complicated: Currently if you check Google.co.uk, there are sixty nine million web pages all competing for the search term office supplies. The search engines have to decide which web pages to put in which order as not everybody can be on the first page of returned results.

Spiders

The search engine creators have decided on a set of rules which they use to determine where they rank each website. These rules are called ranking factors and are known only to the search engine’s creators. These ranking factors are grouped into what are called algorithms and form the basis of how websites are ranked. The next big job faced by the search engines is how they pull all of this together.

The search engines have what are known in the industry as ‘spiders’. They are called spiders because the search engines send these spiders out onto the internet’s linking system to crawl as many websites as possible and rank them based on their individual set of rules. Imagine the scale of this process and it all happens in less than a blink of the eye.

Keywords

Keywords are words or short phrases which a website owner believes are the words that people will type into a search box in order to find a website.
So far I have covered what a search engine is, how they decide which websites to put there and what keywords are. What I will do now is explain precisely why you need SEO for a website in order for it to be successful:

When the internet was in its infancy you could get away with making a few adjustments to your website (known as ‘on site changes’ ) in order to achieve success in terms of search engine ranking. On site changes are changes that are made to the code and content of your website. Other methods that were popular during the early days of search engine optimisation include:

Keyword Stuffing – Scattering your desired keywords all over your website making your site copy very un-readable, but more likely to be deemed deserving of a high ranking for these keywords in the eyes of the search engine.
Indiscriminate linking – Getting links to your website indiscriminately from any other website, in as high volume as possible.

These methods worked well in the past simply because there was less competition. Search engines soon got wise to these methods and were forced to step up their game and improve their algorithms. Even though SEO has been around since the dawn of the internet, many are still unaware of it and those who are aware generally still believe that you can get away with simply applying the aforementioned tactics, when in fact there is now much more to SEO.

Search engines today are extremely intelligent and are improving on a daily basis; it is the primary job of an SEO expert to keep up with these changes. Google last year reported 560 updates to their algorithm- an average of more than one a day. This volume of alterations and amendments really highlights the fact that you simply can no longer rely on out-dated methods of SEO if you want your website to succeed.

SEO as a recognised industry is becoming stronger and stronger every year and more and more businesses are employing an SEO to help them. This is making the internet arena more competitive and increasing the importance of the utilisation of an SEO professional to bolster your website.

As the search engines have evolved so has SEO. Combined with ever changing on site efforts, a lot of today’s SEO takes place off site. The successful SEO today needs to be able to locate top quality websites and obtain a link back from them. A link acts as a positive vote from one website to another. So the key is obtaining as many high quality links as possible. In the past, as mentioned earlier, people would obtain links from anywhere in large volumes, focussing on low quality websites, such as directories. This method has largely become ineffective and the general rule is: If a link is difficult to obtain then it’s probably worth having. A professional SEO will be able to source these top quality links and put suitable strategies together in order to obtain them. The search engines reward quality of links over quantity so its worth allowing your SEO to spend the time obtaining one high authority link rather than allowing him to waste his time obtaining lots of easily obtainable links from such sources as directories. I say this because if you can obtain these sorts of links easily, then so can your competition. By sourcing top quality links you are in effect getting links that your competitor’s can’t.

A few examples of popular linking techniques in modern SEO include:

Blogging
Article Writing
Widget Building
Guest Blogging
Social Networking

Improving On-Site Content

An SEO has to be passionate about the subject and be prepared to put the time and effort into keeping up to date with all of the latest changes. In order to do this an SEO must constantly read blog posts, articles, forum posts, attend conferences and training seminars. This is a constant cycle as things change on a daily basis with SEO and what may be good today for ranking, may not be good tomorrow, which is why your SEO needs to be passionate about his craft.

There are numerous other factors, but the most vital role of the SEO is: to ensure your onsite optimisation is constantly kept up to date with all of the latest tactics; ensure your website content is excellent and link worthy; assemble effective link strategies and implement them and be able to participate socially on your companies behalf through the relevant social media outlets.

All that being said, I get asked a lot about timescales, as in ‘how long will it take before we begin to rank?’. Hopefully after reading the above you will realise that there is a lot to an effective SEO strategy and it’s for this reason that a reputable SEO company will not make time guarantees. We at Web Vitality ask for twelve month contractual periods because of the level of work we put in to each of our campaigns. Generally it doesn’t take twelve months to see improvements and in the vast majority of instances you will see improvements in rankings from the very beginning, but you need to give any firm at least twelve months to achieve real results, so it’s worth budgeting for this timescale from the outset when considering employing the services of SEO professionals.

As you are paying for a professional service expect to pay professional rates. The level of work and expertise that goes in to each campaign is huge. There are companies out there that will offer SEO for a ridiculous rate of say £99 per month with guarantees of being number one on Google in an absurdly unrealistic period of time. After reading the above and having a complete understanding of how much work is involved, surely it is clear that anybody who is charging such a low amount will not be handling your account effectively and is more than likely using every underhand trick in the book. Although they may achieve brief success, the reality is that your website will be penalised by the search engines and potentially banned for good.