Search Engine Optimisation.

Search engine optimisation is all about getting your pages on your website higher on the search engines, I could mention lots of flashy words to define this in a clever way but that’s the basis of it really, though not many people would agree with my statement.

Search engine optimisation is a tricky skill the master, the reason for this is that it changes so much, Google and other search engines are constantly changing the way their results are defined.

Its also not an exact science, sometimes the results can be unpredictable, while being good at SEO means you can often move your site higher in the search engines, even today I am sometimes surprised by results still after 6 years of work within this industry.

BS

Let me start with a few warnings about SEO, SEO is pretty much common sense for the most part there are 100s of myths related to SEO, and also lots of BS and people who claim to be experts when they are not, anyone who claims to be an expert on SEO isnt an expert at all, because you cannot be as its changing all the time.

Be careful who you take advice off and don’t hire anyone who cant prove it with good rankings to back them up.

Things To Avoid

People who try to sell you 800,000 submissions to search engines – a very old con.
People who try to charge you £100s of pounds to even have a look at your website, I will often look at peoples websites for free and give them an idea of what needs doing.
People who don’t even look at your website and just try to sell you link building, while back-linking is part of offsite SEO, its useless without a persons website being optimized too.

I could go on for hours but I wont !

Basics

So many people don’t even know the basics of SEO, when you build a website people often when they first make a website just chuck a few pages together and then submit it to the search engines and then think their website will appear in the results instantly, this never happens now!

Firstly you need to get your site into the search engines index, there are many complex ways for me to advise you on how to do this, just submit your site to Google and bing you can find this on Google, its free and you only ever need to do this ONCE !

There are lots of other ways to do this, but I am trying not to make this complicated.

So what actually happens?

Eventually Google will index your site (put your site url into Google search, if your site appears then your indexed) When your site is in the Google index, as Google really is just a massive index of pages on the internet, every now and again the search engines send a little spider to your website, this little spider goes through all your webpages, this is generally called a crawl, once it has done this it scores your pages on 100s of different factors, each page is scored differently (Google panda has changed this slightly but I do not want to go into this here).

As a website owner you might have seen the crawler on your stats something called Googlebot, and bing also has its own spider along with the other search engines, these sometimes appear on your website statistics.

There are different types of crawls but I do not want to make this any more complex than it needs to be.

So why does your page not appear, well there is something called on page SEO and off page SEO, they both go hand in hand and for your site to be successful you need to do both of these and do them well

ON-PAGE SEO

On page SEO is just getting each page on your website designed correctly, with your tags in the right place and plenty of GOOD quality textual content.

OFF PAGE SEO

Off page SEO, this is generally what we call in the business back-links, for your site to be successful you need to build back-links, I do not want to go too technical here but generally a backlinks is a mention of your website somewhere else on the internet.

So for example if you own a website and you have a friend who also has a website that is also indexed on Google, and he adds your website link to his website, that is a back-link, and when Google crawls that page with the back-link to your website on, you will be credited with this backlink and this will help your site.

This is a simple way to look at it and I do not want to get bogged down with relevancy and anchor text here

PATIENCE

One of the things you need the most in SEO is patience, often changes you make dont show straight away you have to try to think long term and try not to get frustrated, this can be hard if you have hired someone to do SEO for you, as its very expensive to hire someone, however you need to be patient.

CONTENT IS KING

I used to frequent lots of forums and the SEO sections I dont do this as much now, as I find it frustrating.

Often people will post on these forums asking why their ranking has dropped or why they dont have any ranking at all, usually i can find issues within seconds, but the owners often track it back to their back-links or backlink campaigns 99% of the time it isnt this at all its nearly always down to your website content.  This is a kind of denial on their behalf that it cant be their site at fault it must be something else.

I have had a few sites filtered and one banned and I managed to get them all back by changing the website content, sometimes issues creep up on you that you might have overlooked, often there is a change in Google algorithm which affects the way your content is interpreted.

This is what makes SEO

Content is king, if you layout your tags properly and optimise them in a common sense way and also put good textual contenton your pages, that will set your site up well for the future so good luck!

Need Help

If you need any help with your website and any SEO then please send me a message I will do my best to accommodate your.