About SEO:

Definitive Guide
To Search Engine
Optimisation (SEO)
for Business People

The whole world is searching for your products every day. The only thing that separates you from sales is the visibility of your content on the global network. Search engine optimisation (SEO) can give you the upper hand over your competition.

Relevancy of Internet Traffic and SEO

Search engine optimisation - as the name suggests - is about optimising your website's content and structure to make it easy for search engines to process and index your site. Your main goal is to get a search engine to perceive your content in the same way in which you perceive it. It is worth the effort, as it will bring relevant traffic to your website, generating new leads.

In the real world, if you run a Pharmacy, you don't want people to come to you looking for car parts. You don't sell car parts; you don't advertise them. It's irrelevant traffic on your premises. The same goes for your website - the number or frequency of visitors are not that important, but their relevancy is. Before you hire an SEO expert, it's best to fully understand what you are paying for: you do not want somebody to drive traffic to your website; you want somebody to optimise it for a specific target audience. Optimally, your traffic should only consist of people who are interested in your products or services. This alone can bring you profit. Additionally, it is worth keeping in mind that the traffic coming to you from social networks is as important as the traffic coming from search engines.

How Google and Other Search Engines Work

The main goal of every search engine is to present accurate, relevant and up to date content for every search query. The search engine has to check and score each website on a regular basis to ensure the quality of displayed results. This task is called 'indexing'. It basically entails a search engine visiting your website, analysing your content, following your links and checking your authority to calculate how high or low your website should appear on the page of search results and for which specific search queries.

The more focused is your content on a particular subject, the higher it will score for relevant search queries. But content alone doesn't shape the whole situation. Your authority is the second most important factor. In Google, each website has a PageRank, which defines its position in search engine rankings.

If a website with higher PageRank links to you, it gives some of its PageRank to you. The caveat of PageRank is that only pages relevant to yours (presenting similar content) will substantially affect your PageRank by linking to you, and only if you do not link back. This means that the only way to improve your PageRank is to create valuable content (linkbait) to generate incoming links organically.

In summary: your content and your PageRank are the areas on which you have to focus if you want your website to score high in Google (and all other major search engines).

Search Engine Optimisation and Your Content

Image Credits to jetheriot

When writing the content for your website, make sure that each page/sub-page is focused on one aspect/product or service. Or, simply put, concentrate each page's content around one keyword or key-phrase. You have to do some research to find the best keywords and key-phrases for your subject using tools like Wordtracker Keyword Suggestion Tool and Google Keyword Tool. Your aim is to use this keyword and related keywords within the content of the page.

Most Important SEO Factor - the Title and Description

Currently, the most important factor of search ranking is the Title of your page. Make sure the first words in your title are the keywords on which you are focusing. For example, "Dickey's Pharmacy - Painkillers" is not the best option if your keyword is 'painkillers'. "Painkillers - Dickey's Pharmacy" is a better variant. Keep the title short and inviting; it's the first thing people see in search results. Make sure you use your keyword in the 'description tag' of your page, as well. This is what Google displays below the title of your website on its listing.

Headings and Subheadings

Your content should be well-divided by headings and subheadings. Not only does it improve its readability, but headings play an important role in search engine optimisation. Use your keyword and its variations in headings sparingly, and make sure it makes sense to a visitor. There is no point in sacrificing the quality of your content for SEO purposes. You want people to visit your website, stay on it, and come back in the future. They certainly won't if they feel cheated, and Google will penalise you for keyword stuffing.

Incoming and Outgoing Links

Image Credits to sebleedelisle

Getting incoming links is an ongoing, long-term process. You want people to link to you and share your content with others. Instead of finding ways to convince people to link to you, focus on your content and make it interesting, up-to-date and easy to share. Include bookmarklets to the major social bookmarking sites using tools like ShareThis! and AddThis. You can also submit your website to major directories like DMOZ and local Golden Pages.

There is no point in having hundreds of outgoing links on your website. At the end of the day, you want your visitors to stay on your website and not go somewhere else. If you link to other sites, use 'rel=nofollow' in your link tags. This will keep Google from passing your PageRank onto them. Be fair, though, and don't use 'rel=nofollow' if the website you are linking to deserves some credit.

Website Structure and Sitemaps

Image Credits to gigile

It's your web designer's task to produce valid code for your website, but it's your task to decide its structure. Search engines are very smart and fast in the way in which they index your pages, but they are also very sensitive to mistakes in the website's code and structure. If they cannot recognize the code and differentiate it from your website's actual content, they give up and go somewhere else. This does not mean a website has to pass the W3C validation to be indexed, but it shouldn't have hundreds of errors, which will impact your website's position in search engines.

Search engine optimisation is very important in relation to the structure of your website (the way all its sections interlink with each other). Search engines might start indexing your website from one of your sub-pages, and - they should have no problem digging into the whole website following links from there. To ensure this, your website should have an 'xml sitemap'. This is a file containing links to all the sections of your website. Once Google knows your sitemap, it will index all pages listed on it.

Common Sense in Search Engine Optimisation

Your website is designed to support your business and generate more sales. With this picture in mind, your visitor plays the most important part, so the content and structure of your website should be optimised mainly for your visitor's convenience. You will find many websites on the internet that are so optimised for search engines, their content is almost unreadable due to repetitive keywords and key-phrases in every sentence. It's fruitless: search engines don't pay. Customers pay, so make them feel comfortable when they visit your website.

White Hat and Black Hat SEO

Image Credits to timsepulveda

Google does a pretty good job assessing content. Being on the first page of Google results can generate a lot of sales, so companies are paying huge money to get to the top. SEO experts are constantly finding new ways to achieve great results and force Google to index them higher. Some "experts" employ techniques to cheat search engines. This is called "Black Hat SEO". Google, meanwhile, is getting better and better at recognizing genuine content and punishing websites containing SEO spam.

Since it's the most popular search engine in the world, disappearing from Google would be disastrous for your company. You should never risk employing unprofessional SEO companies. You can recognise a bad SEO expert when:

they guarantee that you will get to the top of Google in xxx days
they guarantee that you will show up on Google in xxx days
they say they will submit your website to 10,000 search engines
they promise to generate hundreds of incoming links in mere weeks
they do not show any interest in your content
they do not consult your web developer before editing your website
they put dozens of links in your footer, stuffed with keywords that do not make sense
they do not conduct any research into your products and services, or your current traffic

If any of above happens, it's a sign you should be looking somewhere else. Professional SEO companies are honest, curious and creative.

Do you have an experience with search engine optimisation? Share your stories with us by leaving a comment below!