What is a search engine?

A search engine is a program that crawls the internet, following links, and analysing the content it comes across. When the ‘Google-bot’ visits a website, it looks for certain criteria relating to the page it is currently on and then decides which keywords or phrases are most relevant to that page. When an internet user querys a search form i.e. ‘googles’ something, the search engine matches the search phrase to its vast database of indexed webpages and decides which pages will be most relevant to what the user has searched for. A great video that explains this in better detail can be viewed here.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) then, is the art of optimising your website to achieve the best possible rankings in search results.

The Art of SEO

SEO is more of an art than a science. The algorithms or formulae which search engines use to determine a webpage’s search rank are kept top secret to avoid web masters manipulating their pages to unfairly gain a high ranking. Not so long ago all one needed to do was write the keywords that they wanted to target into the meta data (descriptive content that is not displayed) of their webpage and search engines would simply use this. However it soon became apparent that this made it very easy to cheat, and completely irrelevant pages could end up being ranked highly for a given search phrase. Thankfully search engines have gotten smarter, and while we may not know the exact algorithms they use, we have a pretty good idea of best practices that help us to get pages ranked highly for particular search terms.

Content is Everything. Almost.

The primary tactic for SEO is make sure your content is relevant. This might sound like a no brainer at first, but in reality it requires a lot of thinking through. Many people will write content for their website without even thinking about what search terms they want to target. In SEO, we decide the search terms we want to capture first, and then we write the content to match. If you look at the front page of twenty4 the first paragraph you will read says:

Welcome to twenty4 We could have put up pictures of websites we have done or business-men shaking hands or talked about PHP, AJAX, Content Management Systems, WordPress, Joomla, Magento E-Commerce, Drupal or other crazy words you might not understand… but we want to share with you a few of our favourite photos we have taken be fore we get down to business.

This welcoming paragraph is carefully designed to be friendly and welcoming to our clients and potential clients, but equally it is a keyword-laden paragraph targeted at Search Engines, where we hope they will pick up some of those keywords and index our site accordingly.

When deciding what keywords we will target, we start by deciding on a few key phrases that we think our target audience will search for. It is much easier to get good search results by targeting specific phrases eg ‘web designers Melbourne’, than targeting individual terms eg ‘web design’.

Certain parts of a web page hold higher relevance for search engines. For example, heading text, is regarded more highly than paragraph text and the page’s title and even the page’s url are all important too. When we create links to different web-pages the content that is in the link text, is taken into account by the search engine for the page that it points to.

Offsite SEO

Not only do Search Engines look at the actual content on a webpage to determine its relevance, they also look at which other websites are pointing to that site or page. If your site is linked to by a website that has been around a long time, and has a high Search Engine ranking itself, when the google-bot follows that link, it will be very beneficial for your own SEO. The logic behind this is that if a trusted and popular website is sending their readers to your site, then there is a good chance your site will be trustworthy also.

So how do you get trusted sites to link back to you?

In a nutshell, have relevant content. The web is all about information (or entertainment, or shopping) so if you provide content that is worth sharing you are more likely to get other people linking to you. One way to increase your content is to keep a regular blog or news section. Not only does this provide more content for your site that can be indexed, it also increases the probability that web users will return to your site, and pass links to your site on to their friends and networks. The google-bot also loves to find new content each time it visits.

Social Media

Those who don’t understand the likes of Twitter often mistake it as a trivial waste of time, where users share with the world the mundaneness of their everyday life, such as the often quoted ‘what they ate for breakfast’. In reality, Twitter and other social media platforms are about establishing networks of people who share some kind of common interest, even if they’ll never meet in real life. These networks provide an easy way to share links and spread web content, and as such, Social Media plays an increasingly important role in SEO.

What about Adwords?

Adwords is Google’s advertising mechanism which is closely linked with search results. When you make a google search, you will see at the top of the results page there are usually 3 ‘sponsored links’ and a whole lot more in the right hand side bar. These work similarly to the natural search results with the difference that the listed sites bid for how much they will pay (per click), to be listed for that search term. Running an adwords campaign can be a self-reinforcing aspect of SEO. If users click through to your site for a given search term and find what they are looking, then overtime this will have positive results for your site’s natural ranking.

So there you have an introduction to SEO. These days simply having a website is often not enough to get yourself noticed online. With many large companies hiring in-house SEO specialists, or even teams of specialists, competition for that top spot in Google’s results is tough. But with a bit of work to target your content, and get it out on the internet, the first page is within reach.

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Or read some more from the Client Information Series!

• Writing effective content for your site.
• The importance of relational tree diagrams in planning your website
• What is a content management system or CMS?
• Designing for different screen resolutions
• All about browsers (and why we hate Internet Explorer)
• What is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO and why is it important?
• An introduction to HTML and CSS snd other coding languages.
• How to take a screen capture.