Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been around ever since people started to use the Internet to make money. It has changed a lot over the years, from keyword stuffing and filling your page with h1s to trick the search engines to link farms (remember them?) and blog commenting – these quick fixes have come and gone. The search engines are smart, they know when they’re being fooled, and they update their algorithms accordingly.

So, how can we ensure our SEO stands the test of time? Well, there is one eternal truth to SEO.

Search Engines offer a service for their USERS

What does this mean? It means that at the end of the day Google, Yahoo, Bing etc want to put the best website at the top for all search queries. They create complex algorithms to achieve this, and are constantly updating the processes to ensure their users are well satisfied.

Google have even given us a preview of their latest update “Caffeine”, not easily testable here in the UK, but it does give us an idea about the way things are going.

We can see that Google want to bring more content rich sites to the forefront - sites that are useful to their users. So that’s what you need to be producing - websites that are useful and interesting. We can see that Google will be placing more emphasis on social media and micro-blogging platforms, such as Twitter, so connections are seen as important too.

How will all this pan out in the years to come? I’m not really sure because I don’t have a crystal ball… But, I do think its important to think of your customers or potential customers first, then the search engines second, after all it’s pretty obvious that the search engines take things like bounce rate, time on site and visitor numbers into consideration when creating their indexes.

So, take time to check your analytics. How can you reduce your bounce rate? Test, test, test – there is no hard and fast rule, but you can re-write your copy, change the images on your site, change the headings and title tags, anything that will make a difference can be tested and improved upon. To improve the time on site you could put interactive tools such as videos or audio that your visitors can watch or listen to, though paradoxically this can increase your bounce rate, so keep on testing until you get the balance right. Change the content on your site, make sure it’s well written but easy to read, and has a clear call to action to increase conversion.

Make your site easy for the search engine spiders to crawl by creating well-structured webpages that interlink to each other. Make sure all your pages pass W3C validations.

Off-site optimisation techniques such as link building are still important, I can’t see the search engines ever abandoning this, but make sure you are clever about your campaign. One ‘good’ link is always going to be more valuable than 100 ‘bad’ links. Obtaining the ‘good’ links is difficult and time consuming, but can be done. Write press releases, and distribute articles to online article sites to acquire relevant links. Submit your sites to social bookmarking sites to increase visitor numbers, but try to find a niche SB site to reduce the likelihood of your bounce rate increasing.

Check your site for duplicate content. You can use a variety of online tools to do this. If someone else has copied your site, or you’ve inadvertently copied content (which can happen – especially if more than one person is responsible for the site) make sure you rewrite it so that your site no longer displays the same content as other sites. Regularly check your content, and update it when it has been around for a while – nobody likes stale content – this should minimise your risk of being copied, and satisfy your visitors.

And finally, help the search engines out by providing a sitemap of your site. This is like a contents page or index in a book, it gives a list of everything in your site and the page where certain things are placed. It just makes the job of the search engine spiders easier, and they will reward you for it.

The other day I overheard a conversation / ongoing argument between two colleagues. One said that the reason our websites climbed up a few notches in Google for the competitive keywords Web Design and Search Engine Optimisation was entirely down to our new venture in Video Blogs the other said it was due to the internal architecture of the sites being improved.

I can’t help believing that the reason our sites have climbed the rankings is for both these reasons, and a few more besides.

I started to think that Search Engine Optimisation is a little like making an elaborate cake where the ingredients keep changing and improving to make the recipe richer and the cake better.

There is no one answer to achieving good results in SEO. There are many different ‘ingredients’ to consider.

Good Keyword Research

Keyword research can be a tricky one. Often the keywords that you may consider to be the best are not the ones your customers’ would use to search for your site. There are many tools that help you choose keywords; Wordtracker and Google Adwords Keyword Tool are some of the better ones available.

Once you have a list of keywords you should do a KOI (Keyword Opportunity Index) report. This should give you a list of keywords that have low competition but high search volume.

Internal Architecture

I like to think of the internal architecture of a site as being like the foundations
of a house. You can build a house with shaky foundations but sooner or later
it’s going to start falling down. The same applies to websites.

If you build your site with the search engines in mind by making it easier for them to do their job: crawling, and then indexing the content. You’re closer to achieving a lasting presence in the search engines results.

Regular Interactive Content such as Videos and Audio

Regular interactive content helps with SEO because it can increase the ‘time on site’. This indicates to Google (and other Search Engines) that your site is a useful resource, and that people stay there once they visit it. Also Google indexes audio content now.

By placing videos on YouTube you can get more traffic to your site and increase the exposure of your videos.

We have also started to supply a transcribed version of our videos. This is for two reasons; one for accessibility so that deaf and hard of hearing people can still enjoy the content, and for Google to index the relevant content.

Have a Blog with Regular New Content

Blogs are an excellent tool for SEO. They provide regular new content (if updated! Note: Update your blog!) for Google to index. The real benefit of having a blog is to tell your customers and potential customers about your company and your products. You can quickly become an ‘expert’ in your field by regularly providing new content that is both informative and written with your keywords in mind.

Social Media

Ah, Social Media! This could be a blog post in itself; it’s such a massive subject! Social Media is a useful marketing tool to promote your business. With so many people now relying on Social Media to connect with others you’d be a fool to ignore it.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon can create a vast number of links and visitors to your site.

Link Building Through Directories

Though directories are less important than they once were, industry specific directories can be really useful for getting relevant links. Be careful about the ‘neighbourhood’ of your chosen directory and you should be fine.

Link Building Through Asking Begging for Links from other Webmasters

This is my least favourite aspect of SEO. I must have written hundreds of emails to webmasters with the hope that they will add my link to their site, only for the request to be turned down, or, more usually, ignored. But, for the few that say ‘yes’ this can be a really valuable exercise for link building. Sometimes you get lucky.

I often bypass UK companies on this and concentrate on overseas sites where you are unlikely to be in direct competition with the site you are targeting. This will still give you a relevant link.

Blog Commenting

This is a bit of a grey area. Some SEOs consider blog commenting to be a form of spam. And it certainly has been abused so much so that the majority of ‘blog comment’ links are ‘nofollow’ links and almost entirely useless. However, I do believe that by reading and engaging with others within your field you can quickly become an ‘expert’. By writing well-informed and interesting comments about the post your link may be clicked on by a fellow reader. Reading blogs and keeping abreast of your industry is an excellent way of learning more about your industry.

Article Marketing

Article Marketing is a great way of getting keyword rich links within relevant content. Articles are distributed across the Internet via article sites. The content is also indexed quickly, giving faster results.

Press Releases

Press releases are an excellent way of gaining interest in your product or service. By writing them with your keywords in mind and placing keyword rich links within the copy you can get results quickly.

There is also the possibility that they may be picked up by the Press thus gaining you even more exposure.

Content Writing with SEO in Mind

Content that is both well written and full of keywords can be a difficult thing to achieve, but it is extremely important for SEO as well as conversion. Take time over your content it could be one of the most valuable things on your site.

So, there you go, one of these ‘ingredients’ alone won’t make your site go page one, number one, but a combination of some, or ideally, all of these will help your site achieve high listings.

I’ve held off writing about Microsoft’s new search engine because when it was first released in June it seemed to be premature to write an article about something that I’d not used myself.

My first impressions of Bing were (and still are) “Wow, the photos look amazing”. The cleanness of the interface is great; I like the simplicity of it. However upon further inspection I can’t help thinking Bing has a long way to go before it takes over from Google.

The search results for simple queries such as ‘Plumber Leicester’ give results that seem to be based on domain name rather than the content of the site. The number 1 site has almost no content whatsoever, except a bit of spammy stuff in the footer and some lists about what the company do. The second listing has been suspended by BT (or hacked?), the third listing is Freeindex (a directory). All pretty useless.

search results in Bing

Compared to Google’s results for the same query this seems like stepping back in time. Yes, there are some of the same search results in both lists, but the first search result in Google has more copy on the page, and although the site isn’t a complicated one, it tells a potential customer far more about the company and what they do that Bing’s number one listing.

Search Results in Google

All this leads me to believe that Microsoft needs to work a lot harder to get the core of their service right before rolling out extras such as the shopping search and xRank.  Google have built up their products over time, and their search results are on the whole the best. I really want Bing to do well, because it is unhealthy for any industry to have just one major player, as we have at the moment with Google. But, until the competition bring out something that works as well as Google, or even better than them, then I don’t really think Google have much to worry about just yet.

It is important if you plan to implement, or already have a Search Engine Optimisation campaign that you understand how the search engines work. I’m not telling you to hire a mathematician to try and figure out algorithms – that’d be a bit of a waste of time as the algorithms change so frequently. But there are some basic facts that I think, even if you know them already,I still think its important to revisit and think about.

The search engines have some crucial operations that let them provide useful and relevant web results when their users try to find information, services or products by using their search engine.

Crawling the World Wide Web

Search engines run automated programs, called ‘robots’ (sometimes shortened to ‘bots’) or ‘spiders’ that use hyperlinks to ‘crawl’ the pages and documents that make up the web. It is impossible to work out exactly how many web pages there are but it’s somewhere around 20 billion according to some estimates, search engines have probably crawled just under half of these.

Indexing pages and documents

Once a page has been crawled the content it displays can then be “indexed”. Indexing is basically a giant database that stores all the documents that make up the search engine’s ‘index’. This index must be managed so that the search engine can search and sort through billions of documents in fractions of a second.

Processing Queries

When a user types a search query into the search engine, the search engine can retrieve this information from it’s index all the documents that match that query. The search engines determine the match by checking if the terms or phrases used for the query are in the document. This is why keywords are important, and the placement of keywords is even more important.

Ranking the Results

After the search engine has found which results are a match for the query, the search engine’s algorithm runs calculations on each result to find the most relevant for the query. The most relevant web page will be placed at the top, and it will run down from there. This way, users can choose the site they want to visit first.

Needless to say, this all happens in no time at all – type a search query and the search engine will come back with the results almost instantly. That’s pretty impressive, in my opinion!

The most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo! And MSN) have some of the most complex systems for finding results. Their algorithms are closely guarded secrets, that constantly change and get developed.

By taking this information and using it to your advantage, you can see that the most important thing is to get your content right. This is what the search engines’ ‘read’ in order to index your site and then use to determine your search placement. By using the keywords that your target audience would use to find your services you can gain the types of traffic required to convert users into buyers. You may want to read Content Creation for seo purposes to get some useful starting points for writing your copy.

Wikia search engine was marketed as the new alternative to Google, With the different algorithm promising to provide better results therefore being more user friendly. Any new search engine provides a threat to a search engine optimisation company.

Wikia have now introduced an evolution on their existing search engine facilities, It is called Wikia Evolution. It allows users to add keyword tags to URL s that a user is vistin, which is then placed in the wikia index.

A good idea right? Well not really, if a user wanted to self promote a site they could place relevant keywords etc, excellent, but what if a competitor could adjust your keywords in the index, meaning a seo competitor could suggest that your site is relevant to ‘dog food’ therefore effecting your search position.

Still no competitor to Google, but the day nears when someone revolutionizes search results.