Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short is at its root a fairly simple idea: get your site noticed by search engines. At this moment that really only means Google because it’s the biggest by far. As always with these things the devil is in the detail.

There are three critical aspects to SEO in order of importance:

Internal linking and navigability of your site.
External linking to your site.
Having the right content.

If a search engine spider can’t crawl your site you can be left with the situation that none or almost none of your site is indexed. This can be caused by having: incomplete links, fancy menus, frames or a site build around Flash. A classic example of this is if you search for your company name and it isn't in the first page of search results. This means that what looks like text is probably images and search engines can't do anything with images.

Something I have observed is that often the more successful the company the worse the website. I think that this is a consequence of having too much money thrown at the site. The people that make the decisions get seduced by glitter and it goes all "designery" and useability goes straight out of the window. An example of this was the first incarnation of the London Eye site. The site was white on black as was the map giving directions. The directions were on a background image and most browsers are set not to print backgrounds. So you go to print the directions and you get a blank (maybe black) sheet of paper. It was just stupid.

If you don’t have links from appropriate external sites your site will not be highly rated no matter what else you do. If you are an architect then links from architecture/building/planning/business related sites would be good links to have. If you are an architect and have links from gambling sites, unless of course they are clients, they are unlikely to do you much good. Google is very good at deducing if a link is relavent or not.

The content must be carefully crafted to use the key words that you want to be found with. Keeping pages relatively short and single topic is a help here. The site’s front page is key here. Don’t ever be tempted to have a splash page for two reasons.

People hate splash pages. You only have a few seconds to get their attention or they will go somewhare else.
Splash pages have no text. Typically an external link will be to your domain for example www.yourdomain.com which is where the splash page resides so you have lots of links to no content. Really stupid.

Of course it is much easier to make sure that these and other aspects of SEO are built into a new website.

There are Black Hat and White Hat methods of Search Engine Optimisation. White Hat methods use honest means to direct traffic to a site. Black Hat methods try to game the search engine algorithms using spamdexing to falsely direct traffic to a site. Do not be tempted to try Black Hat methods because you can have your site permanently removed from search engine indexes. Effectively your site ceases to exist. You never ever want this to happen.

Google has some very good advice in its Webmaster Guidlines .

There are many companies offering SEO services with extravagant promises. Beware they are unlikely to deliver and can cost a fortune.

Unless you have a unique product or a unique take on an existing product, I use the term product loosly here, there will already be many, many sites trying to do the same or similar thing as you. What you have on your side is time and patience. If you work at building links and content over time your ranking will improve.

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