There are two trains of thought which have a negative impact upon the term SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation. There is the train of thought that it is used for questionable activities and tactics to try and take advantage of automated search engine algorithms (black hat SEO). There is also the train of thought that it is some mystical art which can only really be handled in its entirety by some kind of SEO expert (white hat SEO). I often see emails blocked in our SPAM filters from people and companies proclaiming SEO expertise and I can only wonder what a non-technical business owner might make of the promises contained in some of these messages – “Guarantee Google Listing” and “Get 1st Place Search Ranking” are some of the promises on offer – but what does this really mean?

At its simplest level, search engine optimisation is the process of preparing your website for submission to search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) in such a way that your website gets the most chance of being found by your intended audience – and it is this last bit where the SEO activities can be found. Let’s use an example to illustrate this: Imagine you have prepared a knock out presentation about your chosen subject and you trying to raise awareness of your upcoming event. You want a packed audience right? Maybe – you could get a packed audience by offering free gifts to every attendee but other than a packed audience where will that get you?–What you really want is a packed appropriate audience. In order to do this you will probably need to ensure things are in order and everything you need is where it should be and that you are dressed appropriately, are giving a presentation which meets audience expectations, and that you are making the best use of the facilities available. You also need to provide way of allowing potential audience members to hear about your presentation. Using careful upfront planning there are a number of things you can do to help your presentation reach the appropriate audience – optimisation in where you announce your presentation effectively and efficiently, target your summary so it reads positively about your presentation and you will also focus on the quality and accessibility of your presentation. Search engine optimisation techniques start out by ensuring things in your website make the best of the facilities the search engine has to offer and that your website is best prepared for it. Btw, if you have a better metaphor I would love to hear it.

In the early days of search engine technology the tools for search were pretty much simple directories which listed addresses of websites much like an index in a book. This worked for a while but it wasn’t long before enhancements made their way into these directories to help providers stand out from the crowd. Some of these extras included website descriptions and keywords describing websites so the index listing became more like a bibliography or a yellow pages (yellow pages in the UK is a phone directory for businesses). Many search engines manually typed in website details so it wasn’t long before automated tools were created to help pull information out of the websites (leading to title, description and meta tags for web pages). Later, search engines started indexing words in websites so they could be used to enhance search results. The natural extension to this was to allow for primary keywords that would more generally define a site and these became known as “meta tags”. Meta tags are basically just keywords whose purpose is to ‘describe information’ and, for a long time (and to a certain extent still do), they played an important part in the development of search engine technology. Search engines are slowly evolving to take this idea further into what is becoming known as the “semantic web” – but that is a story for another day.

These days there are literally hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of web sites, blogs, and other internet based sites out there so when we type a search into a search engine we are often deluged with results – but how does one website stand out from another? There have been many attempts to get this right and these algorithms are still evolving today, from the early alphabetised and interest based lists to first come first served listings to sites based on click through rate, link popularity, link backs and PageRank.

Even today it is difficult for a website, regardless of content, to stand out from other, similar, websites. Take this blog for example, www.jasonslater.co.uk which is a technology blog based in the UK. If I type the word technology into Google it returns 794 million entries so what chance does a site like this, which has been around for a very long time, have of grabbing the attention of a potential new visitor? Perhaps I could refine the search for “technology blog” which using Google (.co.uk) returns just over 204 million links – but lets think about the potential visitor for a moment. If I am searching the internet for a particular technology tip or how-to I might rarely use the word “blog” as, at this point, I am goal oriented and I don’t really care what the format of the website is – as long as it returns the answer I need. Now, as a webmaster and assuming my site has the answer to the problem in question how do I ensure the visitor sees my result in the list of links returned in the browser? I need to optimise the web page in question to ensure it is likely to be indexed in the right way by the search engine. If I get the optimisation wrong, miss an important keyword, or include an inappropriate description the visitor might miss it, or simply not bother visiting may page and guess what – I’ve just lost my potential new audience!

Talking of the list of links returned by search engines, there are often too many to appear on just one page so they are paginated showing just a handful of links on what is known as the “first page”. If you search for tips on search engine optimisation you will read much advice indicating that you really need to be in the first few pages of results in a search engine to really get noticed. Personally, I would also argue that the last few pages are just as important – I often look at the first page and the last page of results and ignore most of the ones in between.

So, you have worked hard on your website and have something really important to say and you are ready to connect to the audience – but how do you do this? This is where search engine optimisation can help – it isn’t a complete answer of course because there are many aspects to SEO, which many professional SEO companies may be able to help you with, but ensuring each page of your website is properly optimised for a search engine should certainly help to raise your visibility amongst the millions of other sites available.

I mentioned at the outset about sites promising guaranteed Google listings – if you want to submit your website to Google go to their website submission page at http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/ – they also have a section of advice and tips for webmasters.

I will be writing more about search engine optimisation techniques with some practical examples, and using my search engine development project to test algorithms and theories,  so make sure you subscribe to the feed to ensure you don’t miss out. One of my academic interests is in search engine technology so my aim in this investigation is to share some technical understanding and experiences of optimisation techniques and hopefully connect with others who have similar interests.

Further Reading

21 Essential SEO Tips & Techniques
Number 7 in this list “include a site map page” can help point search engines in the right direction when they index your site. Google Webmaster Tools can help you.

Top 10 Google Dont’s – Things You Should Never Do for Search Engine Optimization
Search engines are really only interested in good quality content and they are constantly trying to root out loop holes. Number 6 – text hiding is a big no no.

SEO Best Practices: 20 Questions – ClickZ
A list of questions to ask yourself to ensure you are adhering to best practices for SEO.

Illegal SEO Techniques
Good outline of some of the techniques to avoid. It can be easy to get swept away with SEO so always try and remain grounded that your aim is simply to connect to readers with similar interests.

Digital Web Magazine – SEO and Your Web Site
Think about the structure of a web page and consider the impact of add-ins like Javascript.

The best advice as always is to focus on producing well researched and referenced good quality content. In this way you can aim to become an authority in your chosen field you will then be well prepared to gain the best value out of search engines.

Related

• Understanding Search With A Search Engine Project
• Wolfram|Alpha Is Not A Web Search Engine
• Tips To Getting Your Web Content Seen
• Searching For The Answer, Will It Be Bing or Bong?
• MOSS: Configuring Search