SEO Guide ~ Introduction to Search Engine Optimisation

Download the latest version of this guide (V2.0) as a Word document (updated 19/10/2009)

This guide is intended to be a brief, yet informative introduction to Search Engine Optimisation. It is by no means definitive as there are many factors that affect search engine rankings. The focus of this guide is on the aspects of SEO that you can implement yourselves as website owners – it does not go into detail regarding other, more technical, aspects of SEO that your webmaster might need to know.

If you have any questions please email them to me and I will update this guide with new information as and when it becomes available.

Q: What is SEO?
A: SEO, short for Search Engine Optimisation, is what you need to do if you want your website to show up in the search results for search phrases relevant to your site.

Q: How does Google work out which sites to show in the search results and how does it decide which ones should be at the top of the results?
A: Google uses an algorithm that takes into account thousands of factors. This algorithm is like a formula that is used to determine search results. Google doesn’t explain this algorithm to us in layman’s language but we do know what some of the most important aspects are.

There are 2 main aspects to SEO that we need to consider:

  • Off-site optimisation
  • On-site optimisation

If you are serious about improving your search engine rankings you will need to pay attention to both off-site and on-site optimisation – both should work in harmony with each other.

Off-Site Optimisation

Off-site optimisation is essentially generating links that point to your website. Google uses programs called spiders (otherwise known as robots, bots or Googlebot) to crawl the Internet and follow links. The more links it finds that point to your site the better.

Q: So do I just need to get more links than my competitors if I want to be number one in Google?
A: Unfortunately it’s not that simple. It is not just the quantity of links that is important, but the quality.

Q: What makes a link a high quality link?
A: In general the following are indicators of a high quality link:

  • A link from a website or page whose content is relevant to your site
  • A link from a website or page that is already considered by Google to be trustworthy or authoritative (a Google Page Rank of 3 or above is a good indicator for this)
  • A link from a page that has very few other links that point to other sites
  • A link that contains relevant keywords in the anchor text
  • A link that points to a relevant page on your site
  • A link that does not have the nofollow attribute

The more of these indicators that apply to a single link the better, so a link from a page that has content relevant to your site, has a good Google Page Rank, few outgoing links, no nofollow attribute, points to a relevant page on your site and has relevant keywords in the anchor text would be an excellent link to have.

Conversely, the following are indicators of low quality links:

  • A link from a website or page whose content is irrelevant to your site
  • A link from a website or page that is not considered by Google to be trustworthy or authoritative
  • A link from a page that has lots of other links that point to other sites
  • A link that contains irrelevant keywords in the anchor text (e.g. ‘click here’)
  • A link that points to an irrelevant page on your site
  • A link that has the nofollow attribute

Q: What is the nofollow attribute?
A: The nofollow attribute allows webmasters to specify to search engines that a link should not be followed. A link with the nofollow attribute will not be counted by Google and so has no SEO benefit. Some social media sites like twitter and Facebook sometimes use nofollow on their links. This does not mean all nofollow links are bad – links from sites like twitter and Facebook can generate traffic to your site – but they won’t have any direct SEO value.

Q: How can I spot a nofollow link?
A: The HTML source code will look something like this:
<a href="http://www.example.com/page.html" rel="nofollow">Your Link Here.</a>

As Google has evolved the emphasis has been on trying to deliver the most relevant search results for any given search phrase. Above all Google attempts to reward sites that appear to be naturally the most popular. The theory goes something like this: If someone has an interesting website, people who find it will link to it and tell other people about it, who may also in turn link to it. This generates a natural linking pattern and this is what Google looks for as an indicator that a website should rank highly.

Now the truth is that even if you do have a really interesting website, it won’t get enough incoming links to move it to the top of the search results unless people know about it. Imagine you’re the best guitarist on the planet – unless you promote yourself or hire someone to promote you, the chances are you’ll be the best unknown guitarist on the planet. So it is with websites – you need to promote them somehow.

Google understands that you want to promote your website and get better rankings so it produces some rules on how to play the game. As with all games there are legitimate ways to play as well as ways to cheat. The ongoing challenge for Google to is to spot the difference between the two and make sure that legitimate practices are rewarded and cheating punished.

Take a look at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for more details.

Bad Links

There is no real need to go too deeply into bad links at this stage – suffice to say there are plenty of ways in which unscrupulous webmasters try to cheat the system. If you concentrate on following the advice below on generating good links you can’t go far wrong – and just be wary of anyone who contacts you to offer you any kind of SEO / link building services.

Q: So what can I do to promote my website and generate high quality incoming links to it?
A: Thankfully there are lots of things you can do. There’s no point re-inventing the wheel so I highly recommend you 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity - Aaron Wall and co at SeoBook.com have a wealth of information about all things SEO. I would highly recommend printing off a copy of this guide.

So now you have your list of what to do to generate links to your site, you need to keep working with the list until you get the results you want. How long this will take depends greatly on the amount of competition there is for the phrases you want to optimise for.

On-Site Optimisation

On-site optimisation is all about putting the right words in the right format in the right places on your site. This includes, amongst other factors:

  • Page Titles
  • Page Headings
  • Descriptions / on-page text
  • Meta Description Tag

It’s hard to put an exact figure on how important on-site optimisation is compared to link building but it probably accounts for about 20% of SEO. In other words 80% of what makes a site rank highly is due to link building, so it’s best to divide your efforts accordingly and put 80% of your time into link building and 20% into your on-site optimisation.

Page Titles

The main purpose of the page title is to tell visitors what that page is about before they arrive on the page. Let’s say you have a Toshiba 30” Widescreen TV for sale. If someone goes to a search engine and searches for phrases like Toshiba TV, Toshiba Widescreen TV, Toshiba 30” TV, you want your page to show up in the search results. Not only that, you also want that potential customer to be able to see clearly that if they click through to that page they will see a TV matching the phrase they searched by. When search results are displayed what you see are the page title and the description. If you search for a Toshiba TV and you see a website listed in the search results with a page title of ‘Terry’s Televisions – All Makes & Models’, this will not seem like a very good match. What you want to see is a page title that includes the words Toshiba and TV. So for this example some good page titles would be:

Toshiba 30” Widescreen TV
Toshiba 30 inch Widescreen Television
Toshiba 30 inch Widescreen Television – with 5 Year Guarantee
Toshiba TAS3013 30 inch Widescreen Television – with 5 Year Guarantee (the TAS3013 refers to the model number)

Personally I would go for the last option – give as much information as you can in the page title, so long as the information is likely to be relevant to the search. The TV may come in different colours so it can also be a good idea to include the colour in the page title – if someone specifically wants the silver version it’s best to put silver in the page title.

The meta description also shows up in the search results, just under the page title, so this should also be optimised. A good meta description for this example page would be something like:

Toshiba TAS3013 30 inch Silver Widescreen Television, complete with 5 Year Guarantee. In stock, next day delivery for just £10.

The meta description is not a major factor in determining rankings but it can be very influential in improving click through rates, i.e. getting more people to click through to that page on your site. When people use search engines they want to see a website in the search results that matches exactly what they are looking for and even answers questions they have in their mind. I can’t ask Google how much you charge for delivery, whether you have the item in stock, or how quickly I can get it, but you can answer all those questions for me in your meta description. When someone tells you what you want to know before you’ve even asked, that’s impressive and can greatly enhance your chances of making a sale.

As a general rule your page title and page heading (aka Product Name) should be the same or very similar. If you have a page with a page title and page heading that are identical it helps to show the search engines exactly what that page is about. It can also be a good idea to vary the wording, mainly if different people are likely to use several variations of a key phrase to search for the same product.

For more in-depth discussion on this topic take a look at http://www.seobook.com/cleansing-seo-ignorance-public-seo-cesspool-one-blog-post-time

Finally, your on-page product description should be as informative as possible and try to answer as many questions as you can imagine your potential customers might have. As a general rule your product description should be an expanded version of your meta description.

Keywords

Keyword optimisation applies to both on-site and off-site optimisation.
If you sell handbags and scarves you may think the 2 most important keywords for your site are ‘handbags’ and ‘scarves’ and you may then set about trying to optimise your site for these 2 words. This would be a mistake for 2 reasons:

  • ‘handbags’ and ‘scarves’ are considered to be very competitive search phrases – there are so many other websites competing for these phrases that you would need to spend a lot of money over a long period of time to have any chance of getting into the top 10 search results for these phrases.
  • Most people who use generic phrases like this for searching are not looking to buy something there and then. Most people who are ready to buy a product will have done some research already and will use a more specific phrase when searching.

    Somebody searching for ‘Televisions’ is less likely to buy something than someone who has searched for a ‘Toshiba 30 inch Widescreen TV’ for example. The person searching for ‘Toshiba 30 inch Widescreen TV’ has already decided what he wants – if you have that product at a good price there is a good chance he will buy it from you. The person searching for ‘TVs’ or ‘televisions’ has not yet decided which television to buy so you are less likely to get a sale from that visit. If you can rank highly for the keyword ‘televisions’ it can have great benefits – someone who is just browsing may bookmark your site and come back to it a later date for example - it’s just not the best thing to focus your efforts on in the early stages of optimising your site.

    When optimising for more generic phrases it is often a good idea to take a longer term view and try to provide as much information as you can on your site relating to that keyword. If you sell televisions and someone finds your site by searching for ‘televisions’, the chances are that they want more information before they decide what to buy and where to buy it from. If you can make it easy for that person to find information about the various different types of televisions available and make it easy for them to narrow their search, you will be increasing the chances that it will be your site that they buy from when they do eventually decide to purchase.


This principle applies more to higher value goods and will not be true for all product industries.

Miscellaneous SEO Questions and Answers

Q: I’ve been contacted by someone who says he can offer me ‘Guaranteed Top Ten Rankings in Google’ for my website – is this possible?
A: No. There is no way to guarantee top ten rankings in Google or any other search engine. Imagine that 12 people offer the same guarantee for the same search phrases to 12 different website owners – there are only 10 places in the top ten so it stands to reason that 2 of these people will not be able to deliver on their guarantee. There is no way of knowing what your competitors will be doing to improve their rankings whilst you are working to improve yours, and this is why it is impossible to offer guaranteed rankings. The only kind of guarantee that an SEO company could offer is the kind where they guarantee to refund your money if they don’t deliver the results they initially promise, although these kind of guarantees are hard to come by. If a money-back guarantee is offered it will usually be for providing rankings for lesser search phrases, for which there is not much competition.

Q: My site has not been listed by Google, what can I do?
A: Submit your website URL to Google via this link http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=/addurl
It usually takes a few days for your site to be indexed by Google, although sometimes it can take up to a few weeks. If you can get a link to your site from another site that has a high Page Rank this process can often be sped up.

Q: How will I know when my site has been indexed by Google?
A: Search on Google using your website address. If it shows up in the results that means it has been indexed. If it doesn’t show up then your site has not yet been indexed.

Q: After my site gets indexed how long do I need to wait before it will show up for the search phrases that are important to me?
A: That depends entirely on the amount of competition there is for those search phrases. If you are providing a service in your local area and there are not many people with websites offering the same service, you stand a good chance of your site showing up on the first page of the search results within a few weeks. If there is lots of competition for those search phrases then it will take a lot longer.

As a general rule (depending of course on how much optimisation / link building you do and how well it is done) you should expect it to take at least 6 – 12 months to get top rankings for competitive search phrases.

Q: I’ve been told that what I need to do is optimise my meta keywords – will this help my rankings?
A: In the early days of search engines you could boost your rankings by adding keywords to the meta keywords tag, but these days have long since passed. Google does not use the meta keywords tag in its search algorithm. Some other search engines and directories may still make use of the meta keywords tag content, so if you have time there is no harm in optimising them.

As a general rule less is more when it comes to meta keywords – it’s better to concentrate on one phrase or a few variations of the same phrase rather than adding too many keywords.

A couple of years ago I noticed a phenomenon whereby rankings could suffer if a webmaster had put keywords in the meta keywords tag that didn’t appear in the readable text on the page. Bear in mind that text in graphics cannot be seen by search engine robots, so if a keyword does not appear in the text on that page, do not add it to your meta keywords tag.

Here’s the official line from Google on the keywords tag http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/

Q: What about filling my home page with lots of keyword-rich content – will that boost my rankings?
A: By itself this will do nothing, but well-optimised content is one factor of on-site optimisation, so it is a good idea to add quality content to your site that contains relevant keywords. Bear in mind there is a difference between informative content that would be useful to visitors and text that has been added solely to boost rankings. Put your website visitors’ interests first at all times.

Q: What are one-way links, reciprocal links & three-way links? Which ones are best for SEO?
A:

  • One-way link: Site A links to Site B
  • Reciprocal link: Site A links to Site B and site B links to Site A
  • Three-way link: Site A links to Site B. Site B links to Site C. Site C links to site A

One-way links are better for SEO. Reciprocal links imply that a deal has been made between 2 sites to artificially boost rankings (i.e. you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours). Reciprocal links were once a much-used tool for boosting rankings but gradually reciprocal links were devalued by the search engines. This is why three-way links came into being – people thought that a three-way link would look to the search engines like 3 one-way links rather than a reciprocal link. Usually the only reason for a three-way link is to disguise the fact that it’s a reciprocal link, so for that reason I would advise against engaging in three-way linking practices.

Q: What about outbound links? Are they good or bad?
A: Many SEO people will say that outbound links (links from your site to another site) are bad for the SEO of your site. This is not only untrue but also a bit simplistic. If you start linking to other websites simply because they ask you to, this will bring no benefit for your rankings. If on the other hand you link to other sites because they could be useful to your customers then this can be a good thing. It’s all about context. If you post an article on your website about something of interest to your customers and which relates to what you do, and then link to an authority site so that people can get more information on that subject, this is viewed as a positive thing to do and can help your rankings.

If you link to no-one and expect people to link to you, it suggests that you are not entering into what is considered to be the true spirit of the Internet, namely the sharing of information.

The other positive aspect of linking to other websites is to give Google a clearer picture of what niche your site belongs to. If you sell football equipment, linking to sites where people can read the latest news or gossip about football can be a positive thing for your site.

Q: I’ve heard that my site may be in the Google Sandbox – can you explain this?
A: The Google Sandbox is a term given to describe what happens to new websites. Google ranks websites very much on trust – a trusted site will rank more highly than one that isn’t trusted. New sites need to gain the trust of Google before they can rank highly for competitive search phrases and it is generally considered by many webmasters that new websites go into the Google Sandbox for the first 6 months of their lives. Some of the observed effects of being in the Google Sandbox are:

  • Your site’s rankings keep fluctuating, even when you search by your actual domain name
  • Your site ranks quite well for phrases that are not very competitive but ranks nowhere at all for more competitive search phrases

Google prefers to reward long-term endeavours rather than short-term gain. By putting a new website on probation for the first few months of its life, Google is able to evaluate your site properly before it decides how much to trust it. During this time Google looks at a variety of factors including which sites you link to and which sites are linking to you – this helps it to build up a picture of why your site exists and how much value it should have to Google’s users.

Q: I’ve heard that Google uses PageRank™ to determine search results – is this the same as the Page Rank tool I have on my Google Toolbar?
A: Not exactly. Google’s PageRank™ formula is very complex. The Page Rank tool on the Google toolbar is just a rough indicator of a site’s importance – i.e. it’s part of the story but not the whole story.

Q: What is Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO?
A: Black Hat SEO is a term that refers to unethical ways of improving rankings, i.e. attempts to cheat the system. Any gains achieved by Black Hat SEO will likely be only short-lived and will most likely get your site banned from Google in the longer term. Avoid Black Hat SEO at all costs.

White Hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO, namely ethical, legitimate SEO practices. If you concentrate on optimising your site in a way that is good for your customers you can’t go far wrong. The best type of SEO is one that helps Google to display relevant content in the search results, helps your customers find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible, and helps you to generate more sales. In other words everyone wins.

In Google’s Own Words

Here is the official wording from Google about how its search engine works:
“We stand alone in our focus on developing the ‘perfect search engine’, defined by co-founder Larry Page as something that, "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want....
...the software behind our search technology conducts a series of simultaneous calculations requiring only a fraction of a second. Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we're able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

  • PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

  • Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Our search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), our technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query.”

Q: What’s wrong with SEO?
A: Ah, my favourite question! How much time have you got? OK seriously....
SEO exists because of the way search engines work. People want to find things so the idea of a search engine is a good one. But if someone wants to buy a handbag and there are 30,000 websites that sell handbags, there has to be a system for the search engine to use so it can decide which of those 30,000 website to show you first. Now if people were happy to look at all 30,000 sites before deciding which handbag to buy and which site to buy it from, there would be no problem. But that’s not what happens. No-one has the time or the patience for that. So the majority of people will look at only the first page of search results, i.e. the top ten and most of those people will not look beyond the first 2 or 3 results.

So the search engines need to use a formula of some kind to decide which of those 30,000 sites should be in the top 3 on the first page of the search results. The current system uses link popularity as the most influential factor in calculating rankings. This leads to the idea that if you want to get better rankings you need more links. From this perceived need for links all sorts of SEO practices are born. These practices lead to millions of web pages on millions of websites being created for the sole purpose of boosting the link popularity of other websites. Examples of websites that have no other purpose than to be part of the SEO game:

  • Link directories
  • Micro sites
  • Article sites
  • Fake blogs

Thousands of online directories exist solely to provide links to other websites, but does anybody ever use them to find anything? If you want to find something you’re most likely to use a search engine or go to a trusted resource directory about a specific subject.

Micro sites – the creation of multiple websites whose sole function is to link to a larger, central website.

Article sites – sites that exist to display articles. These sites make money by displaying adverts on the pages on which articles appear. Because so many article websites exist, a link from one article is considered to be of minimal value – this gave rise to software that creates multiple variations of a single article. These so-called ‘unique’ articles are then scattered across the Internet like muck from a muck spreader, purely and simply to generate more incoming links to a website.

Fake blogs – I’ve heard of people creating 50 blogs, then populating them with a mixture of human- and machine-generated content, solely to generate links for another website. Of course the blogs themselves need links pointing to them as well, so on it goes.

In short, the way in which search engines work (i.e. putting so much emphasis on links) gives rise to huge amounts of noise and clutter on the Internet. Too much noise and not enough meaningful communication or information. It’s like being in a large room full of people constantly talking gibberish

Q: So what’s the alternative to SEO?
A: If I were building a new website now this is what I would do: I’d pay attention to some basic on-site SEO techniques like making sure the page titles clearly represented what I was doing, I’d make the site nice to look at, easy to navigate, and provide informative content that would be of interest to other people. I would then set about telling people about it. I’d start a blog, post regularly on social media sites like twitter and Facebook, I’d join discussions on other blogs that related to what I was doing and make useful contributions to those discussions – if I’m going to devote my working life to something I have to believe that people will benefit from what I am doing, so my focus should be on doing a good job and creating quality content for my site, then letting people know about it.

Some of my best clients have come from word of mouth, referrals or as a result of people seeing a website I built or an article I had written (which incidentally was written because I felt I had something useful to share with people and not because I thought they would help my rankings). I get a lot of enquiries from people who find my site by using search engines, but many of those enquiries come to nothing.

Recommendations, referrals and introductions are worth so much more than search engine rankings. When I first went into web design many people told me I wouldn’t be able to make a living from it because there were too many other people doing the same thing. But what they missed is the fact that people like people they can trust – there may well be thousands of other people who do the same kind of work, but people are much more likely to choose someone that has been recommended to them. I trust my friends. If my friends tell me that Mr Smith is a good plumber I’m more likely to trust Mr Smith and ask him to do my plumbing. So many times I have met trades people who don’t have a website and never advertise, yet they always have work. They started out by concentrating on doing a good job and gradually built up a customer base by word of mouth.
So in my humble opinion it is better to concentrate on these:

  • Do a good job
  • Make sure your website is as good as it can be
  • Incentivise people to let their friends and family know how good your website is and how you did a good job for them
  • Encourage people to participate in your website by making it interactive – a blog is a great way of doing this
  • Participate in other websites that you believe offer value

To learn more about how good ideas can spread quickly read Unleashing the IdeaVirus by Seth Godin
Now I know there will be a lot of skeptics out there who believe that the modern world just doesn’t work like that anymore and you may be right. There’s absolutely no reason why you should agree with what I’m saying, in fact here are some reasons why you might disagree:

  • What I’m saying is all well and good if you want to earn a modest income from being nice to people but you have grander plans and want to make huge amounts of money
  • Much of what I’m saying you should do is just white hat SEO anyway
  • You’ve heard it all before and you know that Google is all that matters. You use Google when you want something so everybody else must do as well
  • You don’t buy into some fake notion that if you do a good job or sell nice products your business will grow organically
  • You just disagree for no particular reason and you have every right to

So if you’ve come this far and still want to engage in SEO, here are some useful resources and tools.....

Useful Resources

Matt Cutts – He works for Google and knows a thing or two
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Google Webmaster Guidelines
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

SEOMOZ – great site with lots of info about all things SEO
http://www.seomoz.org/articles

SEOMOZ Search Ranking Factors
From the seomoz.org website: “The following ranking factors were rated by our panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, we’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers. Thus, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts agree the most that the factor is critical to rankings.”
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

SEOBOOK – Aaron Wall – Lots of trusted and reliable SEO advice and tools
http://www.seobook.com/

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity – Excellent Reference for Link Building
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml

The Case Against SEO made by Derek Powazek
http://powazek.com/posts/2090

and his explanation once he realised how much he’d struck a nerve amongst the SEO community:
http://powazek.com/posts/2101

and the other side of the argument from Peter and Aaron at SEOBOOK:
http://www.seobook.com/seo-scam

Useful Tools

Google Keyword Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Web CEO – Excellent Free Tool for Checking Rankings plus other SEO Tools included
http://www.webceo.com/download/index.htm