What is SEO ???

[Rainee Bows]

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” search results.
These natural search results are the hard work alternative to any adwords or pay per click campaigns.

The target for many website owners is to appear at the top of a search engine such as google for their chosen keywords and search terms, the holy grail in many website owners minds is to appear within searches on a purely organic basis , preferably in the number one spot!!!
This however is not guaranteed as the search engines and slurps change the alogrithms constantly pertaining to a websites worthiness of appearing. Over doing the techniques by using keyword stuffing or spamming and using ‘Black Hat’ SEO techniques (such as blocks of hidden text within a web page and link farms) will cause your rankings to drop and may even cause your site to be backlisted by the great google.

Typically, the higher a site’s “page rank” (i.e, the earlier it comes in the search results list), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Search engine optimisation may be offered as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.



Focussing on Key Phrases


Keyphrases rather than keywords ?


Everyone goes on about keywords … I think practically any SEO guide ive read will bang on about keywords before they even mention phrases, but very few people type one word into a search engine.

   If you want to buy knickers and you live in a town called twaddlesville, you don’t just type in knickers ……. Do you ?


You tend to write a phrase something like: knickers for sale twaddlesville, this search would narrow down your results making it much more realistic. If you use the search phrase: knickers “for sale” twaddlesville, you’re narrowing the results even futher. Not everyone knows how to do exact searches but you can see how a key phase is much more workable than a keyword.


Many people make the mistake of trying to make their homepage the be all and end all when it comes to SEO, there really is only so much you can do to optimise one page in terms of catching traffic, trying to optimise one page with four different search terms or keywords amounts to what i would term a pretty impossible task. Better to optimise the deeper pages with a mind to what you want the whole site to achieve, this is why we advise our clients to consider their target market and their chosen phrases and words before even embarking on the onpage SEO of their new site. Every page, category, title, meta tag has a relevance when it comes to helping your site perform at its best in the search engine results.


Despite opinions to the contrary i fail to see in the experiments ive seen and conducted myself that meta tags are ‘defunkt’ these days and am more of the mind that anything that can possibly help should be done and done in a well planned and controlled manner. Any text entered on your site has the ability to be turned into what i term as google food, Google is clever tho, it will recognise sentences that are badly constructed and out of context or irrelevant. It will take into account the text around any link you make as well as the text of the link itself, it does indeed read the same way more or less that a human does, so therefore it HAS to make sense as readable content in order for the search engines to give it any credibility.

   To sum up: building an e-commerce store doesn’t guarantee it will be seen by the search engines and bring in business.
    Even if search engines have been to your website; if it isn’t properly optimised they may not index all of the pages and information you have. If search engines do not index your entire site then the only visitors you will have are people you send the website address to.

[DJW]

Excellent post rain.

If search engines do not index your entire site then the only visitors you will have are people you send the website address to.

What do you mean by that?

Darryl

[Lou-art]

Thanks for this, very informative post

[joe2009uk]

Great work rain, very informative post

[Click SSL]

What a great post. Thanks for sharing this useful information about seo.

[old giffer]

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” search results.
These natural search results are the hard work alternative to any adwords or pay per click campaigns.

The target for many website owners is to appear at the top of a search engine such as google for their chosen keywords and search terms, the holy grail in many website owners minds is to appear within searches on a purely organic basis , preferably in the number one spot!!!
This however is not guaranteed as the search engines and slurps change the alogrithms constantly pertaining to a websites worthiness of appearing. Over doing the techniques by using keyword stuffing or spamming and using ‘Black Hat’ SEO techniques (such as blocks of hidden text within a web page and link farms) will cause your rankings to drop and may even cause your site to be backlisted by the great google.

Typically, the higher a site’s “page rank” (i.e, the earlier it comes in the search results list), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Search engine optimisation may be offered as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.



Focussing on Key Phrases


Keyphrases rather than keywords ?


Everyone goes on about keywords … I think practically any SEO guide ive read will bang on about keywords before they even mention phrases, but very few people type one word into a search engine.

   If you want to buy knickers and you live in a town called twaddlesville, you don’t just type in knickers ……. Do you ?


You tend to write a phrase something like: knickers for sale twaddlesville, this search would narrow down your results making it much more realistic. If you use the search phrase: knickers “for sale” twaddlesville, you’re narrowing the results even futher. Not everyone knows how to do exact searches but you can see how a key phase is much more workable than a keyword.


Many people make the mistake of trying to make their homepage the be all and end all when it comes to SEO, there really is only so much you can do to optimise one page in terms of catching traffic, trying to optimise one page with four different search terms or keywords amounts to what i would term a pretty impossible task. Better to optimise the deeper pages with a mind to what you want the whole site to achieve, this is why we advise our clients to consider their target market and their chosen phrases and words before even embarking on the onpage SEO of their new site. Every page, category, title, meta tag has a relevance when it comes to helping your site perform at its best in the search engine results.


Despite opinions to the contrary i fail to see in the experiments ive seen and conducted myself that meta tags are ‘defunkt’ these days and am more of the mind that anything that can possibly help should be done and done in a well planned and controlled manner. Any text entered on your site has the ability to be turned into what i term as google food, Google is clever tho, it will recognise sentences that are badly constructed and out of context or irrelevant. It will take into account the text around any link you make as well as the text of the link itself, it does indeed read the same way more or less that a human does, so therefore it HAS to make sense as readable content in order for the search engines to give it any credibility.

   To sum up: building an e-commerce store doesn’t guarantee it will be seen by the search engines and bring in business.
    Even if search engines have been to your website; if it isn’t properly optimised they may not index all of the pages and information you have. If search engines do not index your entire site then the only visitors you will have are people you send the website address to.

Boy have I got a lot to learn , so one thing at a time, and with such a knowledgable lot here you'll think and realise I am stupid, but what is a meta tag. ? 

[seamus]

Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag. In the context of search engine optimization, when people refer to meta tags, they are usually referring to the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag.

The meta description tag and the meta keywords tag are not seen by users. Instead, these tags main purpose is providing meta document data to user agents, such as search engines. In addition to the well-known meta description and meta keywords tags, there are other useful meta tags, including the meta http-equiv tag, meta refresh tag, the meta robots tag, the meta copyright tag, and the meta author tag, etc. These tags are used to give web browsers and search engine spiders directions or data on various information.

there ye are 

[crismarie]

Very useful post...thank you for sharing this with us 

[EAOM]

If your wanting to know more its best to visit some of main industry blogs: SEOmoz.org/Blog , Searchengineland.com, eaonlinemarketing.co.uk/blog, searchenginejournal.org that's where most people in the industry both share and learn excluding conferences

[sunrisecards]

so where do you get meta tags from ???

[seamus]

Meta tags are part of your websites coding, you only need to add in your keywords and description in the right place and the right place would be in the meta tags, its not really as complicated as it sounds ;-)

[sunrisecards]

my website isn't ready yet but hopefully won't be too long , I'm assuming there will be some nice kind people on here that will help me

[Rainee Bows]

the workshops is the best place to start , Tuesday Evenings in the chat room (icon at the top of the page) from 8.30pm

Rainee x

[Gothsiren09]

OMG - that makes sense!!  I think you may broke thru to me Rainee  - finally!!!

[iwebsquare]

SEO = Search Engine Optimization.