Guide to Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation is the process whereby a particular web page is tuned to perform well on search engine listings compiled from the results generated by search engine spiders.

Or, to put it another way, to ensure that the people who are looking for something you offer, find your page first.

Sounds easy doesn’t it? People are looking for left handed spoons type it in to a search engine query box and up comes all the sites which deal with left handed spoons.

The problem arises when there are hundreds of sites dealing with southpaw cutlery. Research has shown that if your site is not amongst the first ten or so listed in the search engine results, the chances of someone clicking through to your site is minimal.

So how does the canny spoon vendor get into the list of the top ten ahead of everyone else? The answer is to make your website more ‘relevant’.

For all the millions that are spent on them, the sole purpose of a search engine is to connect the searcher with precisely the site they want to reach. In order to do that each web page is scanned by the search engine to pick up clues as to what it is about. It will look at things like the name of the page, the headings and look at the words themselves.

Some search engines will also look at ‘meta tags’ – information about the content of a page which is hidden from the viewer. The purpose of meta tags was to provide descriptions of what a page is about and to provide some key words to help a search engine match the content against a query. However, meta tagging has fallen out of favour because of the abuse by some web masters and designers of which more later.

It will then combine all the things that it has learned about that page into a rating so that when someone asks for information about a particular subject the search engine will be able to deliver a page that, in its electronic opinion, contains the nearest match to what the searcher has asked for.

At its simplest then, search engine optimisation is making sure that the web page you create provides enough ‘clues’ for the search engine to be able to match it to a query from a human being.

However, whilst machines are good at counting keywords and their density on a page, they are still not very good at measuring the quality of a page. Quality, in search engine terms, is measured by the number of links that other sites have made to a particular page. These ‘votes’ are important in determining the position in a set of results where all other things might be equal. A good search engine optimiser will also put in place a strategy to encourage other sites to link to a page.

However, calling your page ‘left handed spoons’ and filling the page with the words `left handed spoons’ like the result of some demented after school detention will not get you to the top of the page. In fact it is very likely to get you banned from the search engine altogether and here’s why.

It all comes back to ‘relevancy’. A search engine wants to provide the user with the best possible experience and give them the best customer experience and providing them with the information they are looking for. Directing them to a page which is filled with gibberish is not the way to give the user a warm fuzzy. In fact, the most likely outcome is a switch to another search engine less likely to have been conned.

Therefore all search engines spend an awful lot of time weeding out pages which contain such ‘spam’. This is the reason why meta tagging has fallen out of favour. It was just too tempting for many web masters to stuff the meta tagging with lots of keywords which would raise the ranking in the search engine results but without burdening the visitor with endless repetition of keywords.

The art of search engine optimisation is therefore to balance two elements – to provide search engines with sufficient clues telling it what a page is about so that it will rank high when someone goes looking for information about a subject. At the same time, it has to deliver on its promise and actually provide relevant and authoritative information that a human being will want to read.

A good search engine optimiser will ensure that the title, headings and body text will contain words and phrases that searchers are actually typing into search engines yet weaving those words into the text in such a way as to make it easy to read.