Search engines are evolving and they constantly change their algorithms. Therefore something that used to work in 2003 now has become a piece of useless garbage. We are all essentially trying to be matchmakers with keywords. The thing is, we don’t have control over searchers or search engines. There are many dubious firms promising guaranteed results, claiming they can offer you a good position on thousands of different search engines. As with anything else, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, so watch out for promises that are too good to be true.

The SEO industry does not currently have qualifications or industry standards. Anyone can hang up a shingle and start hawking their services in search engine marketing. Some of these professionals have developed their skills through proven experience and have the case studies to back up their successes. Others are riding the crest of a business trend and are more likely to take risks to achieve results.

Professional web developers should construct your site using semantically valid XHTML and CSS, which will ensure that search engines will be able to read your site. Be wary of those companies that charge thousands of dollars for “search engine optimisation” as an additional package. Whilst some work may be involved with fine tuning your website content, your website should be built correctly the first time around and give you some initial rankings within a search engine.

What businesses don’t realise is that there is a lot of SEO that they can do themselves, with little to no technical knowledge…

4 essential ingredients for SEO

1. Website structure

From a purely commercial point of view, the goal of every search engine is to return the most relevant results for the end user. Your website should therefore be engineered in a way that makes it as easy as possible for a search engine to comprehend what your website content is about. Make sure that every page of your website is linked internally and that there are no orphan pages. As a rule of thumb, adopt the ‘three clicks and your out’ rule by making sure that any page can be reached with a maximum of three clicks.

2. Keywords

Opting for the wrong keywords can put your whole SEO campaign in jeopardy. It is best to start with highly targeted, long key-phrases that consist of a number of words i.e. “green grocer eastern suburbs”. Once you’ve achieved high rankings for those key phrases, you can start looking at less specific general key-phrases, such as “green grocer melbourne”. Although the more targeted key-phrases will tend to return lower volume of search visitors, they do have more potential for higher conversion rates. Also, try and optimise each page of your website for no more than two different key phrases.

After deciding on your keywords, you’ll want to make sure you are using them. Use your keywords in your website copy and concentrate on your homepage and the pages dedicated to your most important products and services.

• Use each keyword once or twice (no more than 3 times)
• Don’t repeat your keywords over and over
• 1-2 short paragraphs
• At least one key word or phrase per sentence

3. Website content

Your website will struggle to achieve good rankings in search engines if it offers little or no ‘value’ content. Aim to make your website a useful resource to customers to encourage repeat visits. Differentiate your website by creating and deploying useful content, and publish pages regularly.

4. Links for other websites

The greater the number of links to your website from trusted, high authority websites, the greater the likelihood of your website getting good positions in the search engine results. To help increase your exposure, try and make sure that the links back to your website (known in SEO land as backlinks) relate to the subject matter on your own website.

A little about SEO software

No SEO software can guarantee anything. It is a tool, not magic. Simply keep in mind that this tool is simply a tool, nothing more. It won’t help you rank better. It can only help you to make your site rank better. You can run some SEO report within that tool and find some recommendations it gives you, but please keep in mind that a software does not know your current situation. It merely knows of the competition, some keyword data etc., but easily can overlook some more delicate matters that only a human can know about. Therefore, if an SEO company claims that they can guarantee you a Top 10 listing, be very wary.

Free SEO Tools

SEO Book
Keyword Tool Google Adwords
Yahoo! Keyword Suggestion Tool

Google Update

In an online Q&A session, Google’s Matt Cutts answered the questions of webmasters who want to get higher rankings on Google for their websites. Here is a summary of the most important SEO relevant statements of the session.

The effect of +1 clicks on your organic rankings and ads
Google is still testing the effect of +1 clicks on the search results. It seems that only clicks from trustworthy people will influence the position of a web page. In other words, it won’t help to buy +1 clicks. In addition, the +1 clicks on ads will show others who have +1′d it but that is all at this time.

You cannot exclude keywords from your website
It’s not possible to ensure that your website does not appear in the search results for a particular keyword. The reason for that is because that could be a way you could silence critics or not show up for negative reviews.

The age of a website is important but only one of many factors
The age of link anchors and domains can influence the position of a website in the search results. However, Matt Cutts says that you still need fresh information because old information can get stale. Google decides per keyword if the search results show websites with newer or older content. Old websites often tend to have more links and that the links are often the reason why older domains have higher rankings.

Google will rewrite your meta description tag
Google will only use the meta description of a web page if they find it appropriate to the searched keyword. Google will also write its own description to show the searcher why the page was ranked for the query.

What to do if other websites steal your content
You should do a DMCA complain and a spam report, especially if the other website is a spammer who is scraping content completely.

Double 301 redirects are okay
A web page shouldn’t redirect to more than 4 URLs. Chained 301 redirects should be only 301 redirects and they should not be mixed with 302 redirects. Google also detects JavaScript redirects. Matt Cutts says that Russian spammers tried to fool Google with JavaScript redirects but Google could detect it.