Basic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) every e-tailer must know

SEO experts are variously seen as Internet Gods or snake-oil peddling fraudsters - but whichever way you look at it, there is a certain mystique attached to search engine optimisation.

The good news is that while SEO techniques evolve and fine-tuning a website is a fine skill, there are still some basic guidelines everyone can follow to make their sites visible to the search engines.

On-Page SEO

There are two types of SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Off-page SEO is how you can improve your rankings after you’ve finished perfecting your actual web content. But first we’ll deal with on-page SEO, which is all about building your website.

“Content is King”

Without any content on your site, the search engines won’t know what your website is supposed to be about. Pepper your site with terms people search for, and make content interesting and useful (so people link to it). Try not to use images instead of text, as the search engines can’t see it.

Do your research

You need to identify search terms relevant to your site and optimise for them. First, use Google’s keyword tool to find terms people are searching for. Pick one or two relevant phrases for every page on your site and use these phrases in the body and headers of your text. Sometimes it also makes sense to optimise for “long-tail” search terms - which relatively few people search for but, as a corollary, there’s less competition (less people optimising their sites for the phrase). You’ll never be top of Google for the term “life insurance,” but you can easily get to the top for “Hungarian iguana contest.” The only competition you’ll have is from this page!

Choose a relevant domain name

www.spanglificadoodle.com might sound like a cool name, but you’re throwing away a chance to start off on the right foot with SEO. Search engines favour pages with the search query in the URL. If you don’t already have a website or domain, use a tool like Domain Check to see what you can snap up.

Use tags

Tags give the search engines more information about your pages – and few people use all of them well. There are several types of tag. Title tags and meta tags go in the “head” section of a web page.

Title tags

Every page needs a title of up to about eight words (Google will only display 66 characters in its results) to describe what the page is about. This is very important. Incorporate one of your researched key phrases into the title, and repeat the phrase in the main text of your page. All pages should have a title.

Meta tags

“Meta-tags” are invisible and describe the page to the search engines. Meta-keyword tags are becoming less and less important because people abuse them, cramming the tags with repetitious keywords (“keyword spamming”) but it’s still worth using them. Just put a list of up to ten relevant comma-separated keywords in the tag. Meta-description tags are useful because you can use them as a sales pitch: they will display in the search engine results pages (SERPs) when your site comes up in the results.

To see meta tags or any other html elements at work on a web page, look at the source code: in Internet Explorer go to Page-> View Source. Meta tags will be near the top.

H1 tags

Very few sites make proper use of h1 tags. Without going into too much detail about html, an h1 tag should be wrapped around the main heading of the page. If the heading of the page is “Buy cheap umbrellas,” the html would look like this: < h1 >Buy cheap umbrellas< /h1 >. The search engines see whatever’s inside the h1 tag as important, so put phrases from your keyword research into them. Only use one h1 tag per page, and put them at the top of the page where the search engines can find them.

Bold, italics and font size

Don’t overdo it, but occasionally put some key words or phrases in bold text. The search engines recognise that larger, bold or italicised words should be taken notice of.

User-generated content

Search engines love user-generated content (UGC). This is when visitors to your site can leave comments or reviews. It gives the search engines a reason to keep coming back and looking at your site – search engines love fresh content. And why sweat creating content yourself when your visitors will do it for free?

Have a shallow site structure

When a search engine “spider” looks around your website and takes the page snapshot that’s returned in the SERPs, you want it to be able to find all of your pages easily. If you have a complicated site structure, with nested sub-folders and overlong URLs, the search engine spiders will never find all your content, let alone decide how worthy it is. Keep one directory deep if you can. Often there’s no need for anything more.

Submit a sitemap

Another way to guide the search engines toward all the content your site has to offer is to build a sitemap and submit it to the search engines. Building a sitemap is easy and there are free tools available that will build one for you in seconds.

Off-Page SEO

Google turned the search engine business on its head when co-founder Larry Page invented “PageRank” – a way of measuring a site’s popularity by counting how many people link to the site. Now “popular” sites come higher in search results, the most important off-page SEO you can do is to build links.

In-links and anchor text

Links to a page on your site not only act as “votes” that tell the search engines your site is important, they tell the search engines what the page is about. The way they do this is through “anchor text” – the text you have to click on to visit the link. You can become the top result for a search term without even having the term on your web page if enough people link to you using the term in the anchor text. Some people have abused this: in a practice known as “Google bombing,” the top Google result for “miserable failure” was for a time George Bush’s biography; Bush fans retaliated by using the same anchor text to link to Michael Moore’s biography! In any event, the importance of building keyword-rich links from other sites is paramount.

Use internal links too

Just as external links with anchor text tell the search engines what web pages are supposed to be about, so do internal links on your own website. Leave keyworded “breadcrumb” links to other pages on your site throughout your copy.

Link directories and link-swaps

You should spend time putting your site on quality directory websites. You can also swap links with other niche sites, though reciprocal links are far less powerful than one-way links. Every link to your site is a “vote of confidence” from that site, and some site’s votes are worth more than others. I would recommend installing the Google toolbar which will tell you a site’s PageRank. Links from a page with a high PageRank are worth a lot more than those from less important pages.

Getting quality, relevant links

Links from relevant pages are also worth far more than any old links. Try entering a competitor’s site into Yahoo’s site explorer. It will bring up a list of sites linking to that site. See if they are willing to link to you also.

Beware of “Nofollow” links

Wikipedia and blogs generally put a “nofollow” attribute on all outgoing links (look at the source code). This means that while web users can still use the links to take them to an external resource, it won’t pass on any PageRank and doesn’t count as a vote of confidence from that site (although Yahoo! search ignores the attribute). Try to ensure sites that link to you link properly, without “nofollow.”

Things to avoid

There are a lot of shady practices surrounding SEO. People try to cheat the search engines, and though the tricks might work for a time, eventually they catch on. “Black hat” SEO (as opposed to the “white hat” practices we have already discussed) involves staying one step ahead of the search engines and is to be avoided. If you hire an external SEO expert and they try to sell you on any of these schemes, steer clear:

Keyword spamming

Filling your pages up with endless reams of slightly altered keyword terms used to work in 1995. It doesn’t work now; the best advice is to weave search terms into your content so they read naturally.

Invisible words

Hiding keyword spamming in text that’s the same colour as the page background is another practice that worked in days of yore but will now hurt your search engine appeal.

Bad links

Links are the lifeblood of SEO, but links from “bad neighbourhoods” can damage your ranking. While one link from an important site can boost your site’s PageRank into the stratosphere and put you on the first page of Google, links from dodgy directories can damage your search engine credibility. Never pay for links (apart from the Yahoo! Directory, which is a different matter). You will be penalised.

Duplicate content

Avoid duplicate content. If you have a .com and a .co.uk site, for example, and they share the same content, set up a permanent redirect from one to the other. Otherwise Google will see one site as stealing the other’s content and you will get penalised. Similarly, it is unwise to plagiarise another site’s content or have identical pages within the same site.

Overdoing it

Don’t overuse any SEO method. SEO techniques are all about optimising your site and telling the search engines what they need to know. It should be done in a natural way. If it looks artificial to your eye, remove it: the search engines won’t like it either. Here is a good practical example of how not to do SEO.

Finally: be patient

You need to spend time optimising the content of your website, and building in-links. The search engines seem to rank older sites more highly anyway - some SEO experts will buy a domain anything from two years in advance to “age” it. In short, results won’t come quickly and you should expect to engage in a lot of hard work both building links and tweaking your site’s content before you see any results.

By Guy Mucklow
Managing Director
Postcode Anywhere
www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk