Search Engine Optimisation Basics

Search Engine Optimisation is the process by which a website is written or rewritten so that it appears higher up a search engine’s results when users have typed in a search word or phrase.

You may see companies promising you ‘number 1 rankings’ on search engine results, but these are usually false claims. Not only is there no hard and fast method to get better rankings, but methods needed to get better rankings may change from day to day as the search engines change the algorithms which they use to rank sites.

What can be held to be true however is that a site that provides good clear information to its readers will rank higher than a site that is attempting to ‘fool’ the search engines into giving it higher rankings.

The basis for improving any website’s rankings is the text it contains. The text should contain the words and phrases that users will type into a search engine. After a site’s contents are indexed by a search engine, the engine will cross reference its index’s contents (containing references to websites) with what the user has searched for. It is therefore imperative that a great deal of emphasis is placed on choosing keywords and phrases.

Unfortunately, if your site is competing with others, they too will be using the same keywords and phrases in their website as you will be. This means that everyone is using common keywords and phrases around the subject of their websites. It is important therefore to go for niche keywords which may not be searched for that often, but when they are, your website will be among the highest ranked for that phrase or word.

For instance, a website that sells cigarette cards might use ‘Wills cards’ and ‘Pall Mall cards’ as key phrases as opposed to the more obvious, and therefore more common, ‘cigarette cards’. Misspellings are also useful: people will be searching for ‘cigarrette cards’ and even ‘cigarette crads’, so these might be considered for inclusion as keywords.

Once the keywords and phrases have been chosen, these need to be included in several places, including the page’s body text, the title element, the headings, in the alt tags of images as well as the keywords and description metatags. They need to be incorporated as naturally as possible; in fact, a rule of thumb might be, if it doesn’t read smoothly then you are keyword ‘stuffing’, a practice which most search engines can detect and will mark the site down the rankings accordingly.