A Guide to SEO

From Novara Support Knowledgebase

Is Your Website Doing the Business For You? A Guide to Search Engine Optimisation

Studies show that more than 90% of all online users now use search engines to locate the information they are looking for before proceeding with a purchase. So if this is the case, why are Irish companies moving so slowly in looking to online means such as search engines to promote their businesses?

Research conducted by Enterprise Ireland shows that a staggeringly low 22% of small to medium sized enterprises are acquiring significant benefits from the use of websites and less than 5% are getting real value in terms of sales from their existing web presence.

Furthermore according to research carried out by Internet Marketing specialists PraxisNow, a massive 95% of the sites surveyed were estimated to have 10 visitors per day or less on a rolling average!

Irish companies cannot afford to be complacent, the Internet is providing aggressive competition even to what was seen traditionally as the preserve of the “local” business. According to a recent report published by Forfas, the services industry is now starting to feel the full effect of Internet based competition from international companies. In this new era standing still is not an option, Irish companies will need to drastically change their method of marketing their businesses if they hope to maintain success into the future.

A key tool in the online marketing game is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. SEO can be defined as the art of configuring your web pages to ensure high rankings on search engines on the Internet. SEO is without doubt a prime factor in ensuring that your website is well ranked in search engine results for search phrases that are relevant to your business. Admittedly if you decide to do it yourself it can involve a lot of hard work, but the results will pay off if this is correctly implemented.

Achieving high search engine placement for your site involves a combination of a number of complimentary tasks. The elements for success include having an effective website on the Internet, tracking its search engine ranking progress, monitoring your site's placement and revising your search terms etc. on an ongoing basis. There are a number of fundamental things that you need to get right to achieve any kind of ranking.

Here are some guidelines for SEO that will make you money:

Firstly, the key is your website. Before getting into the details of mysterious terms such as Title Tags and Target Search Phrases, I will give a brief overview of what you need to do to make sure people are happy to buy when they “land” on your web page.

1. Ensure that what you are selling is clearly visible from the content of the home page. Research shows that average browsers allocate less than 3 seconds to deciding if a page they “land” on has what they are looking for or not. Therefore flashy sites are all well and good but of limited value if the visitor can’t see what they want to buy from you within 3 seconds.

2. Make it easy to buy from your website. Whatever you are selling, be it professional services or products, the method for finding the cost, features and benefits of what you are selling must be extremely easy. Research carried out by Google found that if a person gets lost during the process of navigating your site or finds the purchasing process difficult, rather than persevere they will click back to the Google results and try the next website in the search engine results.

3. Security: Make sure that any part of your website that takes information from browsers is secure. That doesn’t just mean credit card details; it means newsletter sign-up forms, enquiry forms, anything that asks for information about the individual.

Now lets move on to the elements that will ensure that your website is a winner with the search engines for the products or services that you want to sell. Fundamental to improving your search engine optimisation is developing your target search phrases. You need to check that you have title tags and meta tags in place in the pages that you will be promoting and make sure they are relevant to the content of your website.

Target Search Phrases

A target search phrase that you feel is appropriate to your service can be tested against real life searches that your potential target audience is typing into search engines, to do this go to www.overture.com, click on tools and select the “Keyword Generator” option. If there are people searching in sufficient volume for the target search phrase then modify your website to include it. If not go to the list of results displayed and modify your target search phrase accordingly.

A simple example will illustrate. When we were optimising our website to target people searching for hosting for their websites we optimised our site for the target search phrase “website hosting”. After a month we reviewed the traffic that this phrase was generating and were disappointed by the results. We used the Overture tool and found that while less that 2,500 people had searched for “website hosting” in the previous month 212,000 had searched for “web hosting”. A simple 4 letters made a huge difference in our traffic!

Once you have set this up, you can check your keywords by going to the home page of your website, click on “View”, then click on “Page Source”. This will show the code behind your page. In the first couple of lines you will see the title tags, <title>, the description tags, <meta name="description"> and the meta tags, <meta name="keywords"> (Note: Meta tags are not as important as they used to be and many engines do not even spider them, however they are still a very useful feature to have). This is where you must ensure that accurate and descriptive content is entered.

Getting the right search phrases is critical, as optimising your site for a search phrase, which empirical evidence shows no one is actually typing into search engines, is a waste of your time.

Having title and description tags that are catchy and include the words that are in your target search phrases (phrases that you expect your target visitors to type into search engines when they are looking for your product/company) considerably improves your ranking with search engines i.e. if you want your site to appear when people use the search phrase "Dublin bed and breakfast" it is a good idea to use the title tag as follows <title> Dublin bed and breakfast: visit Dublin's best etc.</Title>. These words should then be used again in your home page text as well. Of course not everyone will key in the obvious search terms and may search under different keywords like “City Breaks” etc. If you have entered such keywords on your website, then there is a higher likelihood that your pages will be searched before those of your competitors.

When creating your website’s content, it should not be forgotten however that the most important factor to consider is the audience. Personally, I find there is nothing worse than reading a Web page, whose content is merely a mix of clever keywords put together to ensure the page is a high ranker. Don’t expect your customers to relate to the information on your site if it is not easy to read and understand!

Other important factors that will ensure that your web pages at least have a decent chance of turning up in relevant searches include the following: · The URL must resolve to an operational Web page. It may not generate error messages such as “File not Found”. The Web page must be accessible and not require a username, password, cookie or other authentication in order to have access.

· The Web page to be indexed must not be on a secure server (i.e. https).

· The Web page must permit so called “spidering technology” such as not using a “robots.txt” file.

· The Web page must contain visible text (not graphics only).

Pagerank:

You’ve done the hard work on configuring your pages to reflect your Target Search Phrases but are still not getting the traffic you want? Page Rank is more than likely the culprit! Page Rank is an algorithm that Google came up with to help it differentiate sites that had the same concentration of Target Search Phrases, the objective being to provide users with relevant content that a majority agreed is “the best” source for any given search. In a nutshell, how it works is that Google regards the linking of a relevant website to yours as a vote for you, i.e. someone thinks that you are worth linking to. The more votes you get from relevant (and that is key) sites the higher your Page Rank, the higher your Page Rank the higher your website appears in searches for the phrases you are targeting.

Without question, creating successful links to your website is by far the hardest and most challenging part of your search engine marketing, however if successfully executed can ensure a vast amount of traffic will be directed to your site. Firstly, you will need to ensure that your website has links to it from other sites to deem it worthy of a Google ranking or similar. If you do not have one already, you should consider inserting a “Useful Links” page on and set about getting reciprocal links with relevant websites.

If you think about it, how often do you actually bother scrolling through to the second or third page of your search results? Not often, correct? Which is why you need to ensure appropriate links to move up in the page rankings! You should identify websites that are relevant to the subject of your website (for example if you are a Dublin B&B, you will want to secure a link on the Bord Fáilte website). By doing this you can contact relevant link exchange partners. If you source useful and appropriate links to your site, this can considerably raise your profile on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). These days most people ignore incoming link requests however it is worth trying if you know the person running the other website. The request must be personalised, no one is going to read something that looks like Spam! An example would be to send a link to any of the sites you link saying the following:

"Hello, my name is X. I have visited your site and feel that the content about [insert the topic of the web site here] might be of interest to your visitors. My site address is: "[insert your URL here]". I have already placed a link to your site along with a description at [insert the URL of your Links web page here]. I would appreciate if you would place a link back to my site using the following description/graphic: [Insert a description of your web site here] If you would like the description of your site modified at any time or you have any other cross-promotion ideas please let me know.

Best regards,"

Take a look around the directories operated by the key search engines and depending on your budget, consider submitting to a couple of the key players – Google, MSN, Yahoo, Lycos, AskJeeves, AltaVista and AOL Search to name but a few. Although not all of the directories are free, there are a few useful ones and submitting to them may increase visitors to your website.

Other clever ways of creating links to your sites are through the old reliables of weblogs and posting on online forums. Blogs are a cheap and effective way of attracting backlinks to your website. Do remember however, don’t blog for the sake of bringing traffic to your site, make sure there is a reason for your blog! Bad publicity is definitely not going to raise your profile!

Good luck with your efforts and remember that even a small amount of time spent on the above techniques can yield handsome returns.

By Alison Reilly

Register.ie