What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? Wikipedia will tell you that it’s “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via ‘natural’ or un-paid (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results”.
This definition explains why SEO is also referred to as Organic search or Natural Search to make it distinct from Pay Per Click-style methods of paying to bump your site as high up a search engine’s search-results list as possible.
It is well-known by anyone involved in SEO Services that SEO drives 80 per cent of search engine traffic compared to Pay-Per-Click’s 20 per cent. But the methods search engines use to decide how prominently on a search list an item appears are shrouded in considerable mystery. If search engines did advertise these ‘algorithmic factors’ people could manipulate the results, hence SEO’s reputation as a black and mysterious art.
Most search-engine factors people read about are a result of agencies or individuals testing different ideas to develop their SEO services – something No Pork Pies has great experience of.
Below is a list of some of the SEO factors No Pork Pies can help you consider:
Technical Obstacles – It is vital to consider SEO when you are designing your site. The use of programming languages that search engines can’t de-code or have trouble with (such as Flash or Javascript) could mean that your site gets overlooked in the ranking stakes. Poor site coding = websites invisible to search engines.
Content –Search engines will conduct regular ‘sweeps’ of your site’s pages to try and get an idea of what your site is about. Don’t make these sweeps difficult; populate your on-site content with enough keywords to ensure that your site is ranked for all relevant search terms. Thinking about content at the design stage of the site build can save you heartache later.
Navigation or Structure –The links throughout your site should be thought of as signposts to help search engines identify the ‘hierarchy’ of the site structure. The most important pages should be higher up the site, not buried in hard-to-reach corners.
Fresh Content – You can never rest on your laurels – search engines constantly monitor how often your site content is updated. New content will help your site to be ‘crawled’ more regularly, boosting your rankings. Blogging and writing news items are excellent ways of adding fresh content.
Site load time – This is a new addition to the ranking algorithm; the slower your site the more quickly you will lose potential positions in the search results. So if you think you’re waiting too long for your site to load up, the chances are that you’ll be waiting some time to climb the search results list too!
Links –Links are closely, well, linked to search engines’ rankings. Placing irrelevant links from your friends’ sites might have fooled Google a few years’ ago but it is unlikely to make a difference now!
Real-Time Search – Another new addition, engaging in ‘real-time’ networking such as Twitter can mean you rank for a particular hot topic in the real-time search results.
Video & Images – Overlook YouTube at your peril; it’s the second-largest search engine in the world. Considering whether adding video content links to your sites is a vital part of SEO strategy.
In conclusion…SEO should not be viewed as a cheap way of increasing website traffic. There is a lot of specialised work involved in undertaking SEO campaigns and seeing them through but the rewards are worth it.
At No Pork Pies we know that a good SEO person should be spending a large percentage of their time collecting and interpreting analytics, positions and data. If your SEO person isn’t using a web analytics package then they are not doing their job properly!
Contact us for a Free SEO audit of your site to understand missed opportunities