What is Search Engine Optimisation?
Content is king!
To be more in-line with the way most people think of Search Engine Optimisation, and to a lesser extent how it is often described to web novices, we have broken this article out of the main one to focus on the links, content and how easily each page can be found.
It may be a slightly different way of explaining it, but hopefully you can stay with us long enough to get through the whole subject.
There is a big section above this page on the overlying subject which we have called "web site optimisation". This is the process of improving background items that the user will not necessarily notice, unless you have a really slow site.
Learn to love Spiders
Each of the companies who run search engines spend millions per year on research and development of programs called spiders.
The spiders go around the web and pull out information from every web page they discover. You can think of it as two separate databases, one of links between sites and within sites, and another with the content for each page discovered.
Content
The content database holds all of the content from each page on your site, and would be used to work out what each page is about.
The key here is not to write any content, but to provide the answer that the end user wants. As each search engine makes money from advertising, it is in their interest to keep you using them by sending you to the right places.
Links
When new links are found, the spiders update another database of content to go and look at.
The easiest way to let these spiders know what content is in your site is by creating a sitemap and easily navigable menu structure.
External links can be measured to show how popular any particular page could be. So links from the most important and popular sites are more valuable than links from smaller ones. At the same time, links from bad sites, and these can have a negative effect on the value of your site and or pages.
Other
The search engines also keep track of a few other things;
- bounce rate - when a user goes straight back out from your page without performing any action
- site speed - how quickly your site loads
- shares - how many times someone shared each page
- mobile friendly - 50% of searches are done on hand-held devices, make sure your site works on these!
All of these factors (and more) go into how you perform in each search.
Keywords
In the days when search engines were a little less clever, they invented a method of the web site owner telling them what were the important words on that page, it was a brilliant solution. The owner simply had to add the as a list of comma separated words and bingo, the traffic appeared.
Once unscrupulous owners worked out that they could spam these words, then search engines started ignoring them. In 2009, Matt Cutts (the of Google) stated that they no longer use meta keywords.
Where do keywords go now?
Your keywords should form part of the content, URL, header and description (see below for header/description). The tricky part is to avoid stuffing these words as then each page just appears like spam to both the end user and search engines.
Use image descriptions to emphasise what each section or image is about.
Keeping your content natural should naturally build up the density required to please both users and spiders.
Our Content Management System no longer injects keywords into the web pages, but does use them internally as a quick way of linking documents.
Headers and Description
While keywords were dropped by the search engines fairly early, the header and description meta data are fields that can encourage users to click from the search engines to your site as can be seen in the image.
Header
Keep it short and punchy.
When kept within 20 to 70 characters, this can be used by the search engines in their results pages.
Description
Keep within between 100 and 170 characters and keep it as concise as possible while still trying to convey the essence of the page.
If it is too long it may get truncated, too short or missing and the search engine may make one up or use a snippet from within the page.
Notice how keywords have been highlighted in bold, this is a good example of using them in the description.
Link quantity and quality
If you are a web site owner, you've probably had hundreds of emails from people saying that they can get you on page one of Google by link building. This simply isn't true by these methods alone, and I've seen people complain in forums that is has made the situation worse.
When they are generating a huge volume of links to your site, these links are seen as unnatural and won't help you at all.
Good natural links for most businesses will more likely come from social media or like minded bloggers/companies. Encourage your users to share links to your website by providing easy to use share buttons on each page where possible.
Remember though, that you need to write good quality content for it to be shared or linked to, so that is where to put your focus.
I've popped a link below to an article by Rand Fishkin over at Moz, on the concept of link earning, as opposed to link building, and even tho it was written in 2012, it is still as relevant today as then, if not more so.
Myths or truth? Text to code ratio and content length
Some of the claims made by the experts examined.
Text to code ratio
Although a bit of an unknown, it is believed that the amount of content compared to the amount of code that goes into the site can also have an effect. There is no absolute magic marker, but most companies seem to set the bar at a minimum of 25%.
The score can still be used, as it may point to content that either has an issue, or could be too short.
Content Length
Another often stated claim among SEO companies is that there is a sweet spot for content length of around 1000 to 2000 words, up from around 500 a few years ago.
What do we think?
My opinion is that what is actually effecting the site is the time it takes the site to download the amount of content provided and content quality.
If you have a faster lightweight site you can probably write smaller, more concise but well constructed content.
Most modern site builders have bloated code that make a longer article download time more reasonable.
- We can't stress enough, that you don't write content for the sake of it, that can dilute the impact of the article.
- Use Headings, as in this document, the headings give more of a clue to the reader and search engines as to what each section is about.
