Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a process of marketing placement. In marketing, placement refers to the medium by which a product or service is presented or sold. In the case of SEO that medium is the World Wide Web.

More specifically, SEO is improving the volume and quality of visitors to a web site from search engines for targeted keywords. To really understand SEO you need to understand How Search Engines work.

SEO has both objectives and methods, essentially what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it.

Objectives

Objectives are your desires. You don’t 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 examples 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 “Galway 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.

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 with 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. I’m just going to go through a few here...

Start with content management; make your site worth visiting, the more work you put in the more you will get out of it.  

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).

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 is 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 don’t want your customer to think you can’t 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 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.

Make sure that your site is W3C compatible.

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 though out 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 Design and Development rather than HarvardInnovations.com.

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 this higher rankings. Doing so will probably require you to provide a link to their site on your website. There is no shame in, 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!

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 I would say it’s mandatory to register with 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.

Published by

Paul Tierney
Senior Software Engineer & Project Manager at Harvard Innovations
Harvard Development Galway (HDG)

+353 91 442 082