Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is where you work to make your website appear high in the natural Search Engine rankings.

The main difference between SEO and Adwords is the former is free in the sense you don’t pay Google or the other Search Engine companies for the privilege of appearing there. It’s not free in the sense you’ll get it without putting some effort in (and just like Adwords, the more desirable the keywords you’re trying to get listed on, the more competition you’ll have, and the harder you’ll have to work on it.

Back in the “old days”, all the tricks and techniques you could use for SEO were confined to your web‐page itself: the title, content, and meta‐data.

Now, though, especially since Google has come to dominate the Search Engine market, it’s a lot more complex than that.

Yes, it’s true your actual page is still relevant, and Google have some very powerful algorithms in place which look at your page as a human would (or at least, as close to that as they can come), but they also take into account the number of other pages linking back to that page, as well as how relevant to your page the pages linking‐back to you are (this is to stop you from having “link farms” which are just pages of links pointing to other websites). These are called “backlinks”. They are very important.

Nowadays, the key to effective SEO consists of three parts:

1.

Informative, interesting and relevant content. This is always key. The search engines are getting more and more “human”. You won’t go wrong by than updating your website with frequent, genuine and relevant content.

2.

Articles. Article marketing is a great way to get loads of quality backlinks to your website. As always, though, your articles themselves must follow the AIDA formula.

3.

Video. Google owns YouTube. Hence, YouTube, and other video publication sites, are preferentially listed by Google and the other Search Engines when it comes to SEO.

Unfortunately, with SEO there are no magic bullets or guarantees. It’s about quality rather than quantity, and if you refrain from trying to “trick” the Search Engines and instead concentrate on what your human visitors would like to see, you won’t go far wrong.