What is Search Engine Optimisation?

More specifically, SEO is improving the volume and quality of visitors to a web site from search engines for targeted keywords. SEO has both objectives and methods, essentially what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it. Objectives are your desires. You do not need to know anything about marketing to set your objectives. An objective would take the form of getting "key areas" of your website a top 5 ranking for specific phrases with as many search engines as possible. Objectives usually take the form of phrases. For instance If you were in the Real Estate business an example of an objective would be "Real Estate", "Property for Sale" or "Houses for Rent". However if you search “Real Estate” in Google you will get almost 650, 000, 000 results. And you can bet your site is nowhere near the top. So how do you climb the ranks? To start, have more than one Objective! Have several objectives, short term objectives (easy) and long term objectives (long term). A short term objective might be to get a number one ranking for “Dublin Real Estate” a long term would be to get a top 5 ranking for the more general term “Real Estate”. Have no less than 25 unique objectives, this will force you to think outside the box. Use the Google Keyword tool to help you determine your objective Key Phrases. Pick phrases that have high monthly search volumes so that you are targeting areas where this a lot of people searching. Once you have your objectives in place the next step to set the order in which to active these objectives. Sort your objectives by how difficult you think they are to accomplish. The difficulty of each is usually proportionate to the total number of results returned by Google for each term. For instance if you are a Real Estate agent operating out of Tuam, Co. Galway, Ireland your objectives may order as follows:

 1.Real Estate (650, 000, 000 results)

 2. Real Estate Europe (33, 000, 000 results) 

3. Property for Sale (31, 300, 000 results)

 4. Real Estate Ireland (22, 300, 000 results)

 5. Real Estate Galway (2, 740, 000 results) 

6. Houses for Sale (10, 800,000 results) 

7. Real Estate Tuam (27, 000 results)

 8. My Company Name (??) You will find that the order you end up will match your marketing priorities quite well. And remember to never lose sight of your objectives!! 

Methods: 

There are many methods used to achieve SEO objectives.  To really understand methods available, you need become technically aware of How Search Engines work. We go through a few pointers here... Start with content management, make your site is worth visiting, the more work you put in the more you will get out of it. Content is king. When structuring your website make sure that you have plenty of navigation links bearing your objective key phrases. Think of your visitors when writing content, don’t use industry specific terms without linking to its definition. For instance if you use a term like “Interlace”, make sure that word links to a page on your site explaining the term. This will increase the chance of a third party website linking to your site (for definition purposes). Vary product and service terms thoughout your website. For instance if you sell kitchen worktops, make sure that you vary the term with kitchen countertops if you dont you lose market coverage.Publish useful information not just specific to your industry, for instance if your business sells real estate it may be no harm having pages dedicated to "loan rates", "Designing the Perfect Home". It doesn’t matter how unrelated as long as it contains useful information!! Dedicate WebPages to mistyped versions of the Key Terms. For instance if you are providing “Marketing Solutions” dedicate a page on your site to “Marketting Solutions”. It’s a common typo! However on this page make sure you explain the situation with a “Did you mean “Marketing Solutions?”. You do not want your customer to think you cannot spell. Make sure that all of your pages have descriptive Titles and Descriptions. This is accomblished by providing Meta data with your web pages. Dynamic websites usually provide tools to carry out such tasks. Make sure that your pages load quickly, a webpage on average should load in less than 3 seconds on a reasonable broadband connection. To check this save the source of your webpage to your Desktop. Right click on the file then click properties. The file size should be no more than 30 Kb. Website performance may also be related to sloppy programming or a bad CMS  Make sure that your site is W3C compatible, there is much debate over how significant Google regards this, but one thing is for sure. W3C is all about catering to the largest audience possible, Google advertises the same objective. Reciprocal Links - Learn how the search engines work. Search engines generally work on the principle of reciprocal links whereby search engine robots are dropped randomly thoughout the web and travel/crawl from website to website using these page links as a bridge. While a search engine robot is on your website, it extracts and compiles specific information from each page and saves that page in its huge storage of the World Wide Web. This process is referred to as Indexing. However all search engines enforce additional principles in a bid to make their search results more relevant so keep up to date on the latest hoops you need to jump through. Title your reciprocal links where you can, for instance if I asked to you to put a link to our site on yours I would ask you to display the link as Website Development and Design rather than HarvardInnovations.com. If you look at all of our customer websites you will see examples of this. Register with as many Website Directories as possible. Although rated pretty low by search engines, search robots crawl these directories quiet regularly. Doing this “WILL” increase the number of times the search robots land on your page thus higher rankings. Doing so will probably require you to provide a link to their site on your own website. There is no shame in this, take a look at ours by visiting our Services Directory Don’t try and trick the search engines, you might get penalised. Almost every trick in the book has an algorithm to detect it. For instance, if you plagiarise content from other websites you will be caught. If you use hidden links, keyword spamming, keyword domains irrelevant content...you will be caught!. Just create useful content that relates to your business and offer interesting content offering to browsers. Post blogs and participate in relevant forums and bulletin boards. This will give you an insight to what the web population are looking for. If you are a Building Contractor and someone posts the question “What is a Floating Kitchen”? Post a reply to this person consisting of a link to the Floating Kitchens section on your website. Don’t have a floating kitchens section of your website???...Create one! 

Google Web Master Tools If you have a website we would say it is mandatory to register with the free Google Webmaster tools . It will give you great insight to how the Search Engine indexes your site. It will tell you when your site was last indexed, what Google’s findings were, who’s been visiting your site, top search queries finding your site and much more. To register with Google Webmaster Tools simply go to www.google.com , on the top right hand corner of your screen click sign in and go from there.