Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Positioning, Increasing Site Visibility. It doesn’t matter what you call it, it’s valuable for any website. In a previous post (The Content Strategy For My Blog), I mentioned that it isn’t my only strategy for driving traffic to my site, but don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not ignoring it. It’s almost expected these days that good sites will pay attention to it. It just isn’t the only thing I’m doing to promote my blog.
But before I go into detail about what I’m doing exactly, a bit of background might help.
First, there isn’t much point of having a web page if no-one can find it – and there is an enormous number of web pages in the world. For example, if you do a search under “SEO”, Google will return around 186,000,000 results. How is it possible to get your site to make it into the first three pages of results?
Because the first three pages are where 99% of your audience will stop looking.
Basically, the factors that come into play are:
- how high your page’s PageRank is, and
- how closely the user’s search terms match the Keywords on your page.
It’s the interaction between the two that determine where your page appears on any list of search results. (Oh, there is one thing I should mention, and that’s the percentage of searches controlled by Google. According to Hitwise.com, Google is currently the search engine of choice for around 73% of US searches, and significantly higher in other markets (over 80% in Canada, for example). Effectively, search engine optimisation therefore means optimising for Google.)
Here’s the important bit: if the keywords on your page match the keywords on your competitor’s page, your respective positions in any search results will be determined by the relative worth (PageRank), according to Google, of your page as a whole.
The opposite is true as well. If Google perceives both your webpage and your competitor’s website as being equally valuable (same PageRank), then it’s how closely the keywords on your page match the search terms that determine your respective positions in any search results.
The factors that will improve your page’s PageRank include:
- lots of links from other sites connecting to yours
- lots of links from related sites (sites discussing similar topics) connecting to yours
- links from sites with a high PageRank connecting with yours
- lots of unique, good-quality content
- frequently updated content
- the age of your site, and
- a good navigational structure which lets the majority of pages be indexed.
Knowing this is the first step to doing something about it. There are positive ways (often called the “white hat” approach) and there are devious ways (the “black hat” approach). I’ll no-doubt talk about this a bit later, but for now it’s enough to say that Google doesn’t like sites that use black hat techniques, and is very likely to respond negatively.
My content strategy includes using white hat techniques, and I’ll detail exactly the steps I’m taking over the next few posts. If you’re new to SEO, stay tuned. Some of the things I’m going to say may well change how you’re doing things.
