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Search Engine Optimisation

Making the Search Engines work for your business.

It is a well know fact that being top of the search engines is key to a successful website.

So how do I get to the top of the search engines?

The are many factors that affect the success of a website on the search engines, below are just some of the factors that can have an effect:

• Age of the domain name
• Frequency of content changes
• Quality of content on website
• Quality of title tags
• Quality of description tags
• Links from other sites to your site
• Quality of links to your website
• Google Pagerank of your website
• Quality of programming of website

The above list is just a small selection of the hundreds of contributing factors to getting a high ranking on the search engines. For more information on how BeVivid can help promote your business via the web, email sales@bevivid.co.uk or contact our sales team on 01743 874111

Some common SEO questions and answers

Define SEO as it applies today.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the ongoing modification and manipulation of a website to maximise its marketing potential on the search engines. The overall goal is to increase the number of visitors to a website.

How do search engines differ in the way they rank sites, and what difficulties does this present to the DIY SEO expert?

Search engines use various methods to rank the order in which websites are displayed. Some use fairly simple calculations and criteria, others use complicated algorithms to establish the most appropriate links to display.

The ever evolving nature of the search engine calculations, poses a problem to a DIY SEO expert as 'keeping a finger on the pulse' is an ongoing process. Basically as the search engines change the way they calculate the position of a site, webmasters need to address the search engine calculation changes and make website adjustments, in an ongoing battle to keep the website at its highest possible ranking.

Should a business be looking at blanket search engine coverage, or is a targeted approach preferable?

Blanket search engine coverage is important in obtaining maximum coverage for a website. 'Blanket coverage' doesn't necessarily mean looking at all the individual search engines individually, but more to do with getting all the SEO 'rules' correct for the big players, and if done correctly the other search engine rankings generally follow suite. When considering which search engines to concentrate on, I would recommend following the marketplace. Google we all know is the market leader so has to be the first to consider when starting your SEO, closely followed by Yahoo and MSN. I believe if you get these 3 right you are not going far wrong.

If content is king, does keyword analysis still matter?

Keyword analysis in my opinion is still effective. We all know 'content is king', but analysing your target keywords and integrating them with your content has to be the way forward. I have seen far more SEO success when content is keyword rich and keyphrase rich.

When does keyword chaining become keyword stuffing, do all search engines respond the same, and what is the likely nature of that response?

I believe there is a very fine line between keyword stuffing and including a sensible volume of keywords in your content.

Ensuring your content is keyword and keyphrase rich can be achieved without 'stepping over the line'.

Looking beyond keywords, what is the importance of domain and URL optimisation, and how should the small business go about getting the best from this for the least financial outlay?

In my experience domain names seem to play a large role in the effectiveness of a successful SEO strategy. Keywords appearing in not only your domain name, but also your URL, seem to have a profound effect on the ranking of your site on the major search engines.

What about going even deeper with the SEO net with such things as code optimisation and file extension optimisation? Waste of time or can they bring real universal results?

Making the search engines life easier to view and visit your website can only assist in your SEO. With this in mind, minimising your code and thus maximising your content to code ratio, can only work in your favour. There has also been concern in the past over file extensions and their length, with variables appearing after the extension. This can be combatted in various ways, but masking dynamic, long extensions with keyword rich static looking extensions seems to have the most success.

Metadata is not as effective as it used to be where SEO is concerned, but is it a complete dead duck now? If so, why so, and why did it used to work?

Metadata used to be an effective way for search engines to easily identify the website contents. In recent years SEO has moved further away from metadata as a way of promoting a website. However certain components of metadata are still used when ranking websites. Keep your metadata concise and accurate with your content and you won't go far wrong.

Is text and image placement just a design issue, or can it impact upon the effectiveness of your SEO?

'Content is King' to effective SEO, and keeping your content as close to the top of your code as possible can only have a positive effect on the success of your SEO. Therefore, apparently it has believed that keeping content to the left-hand side of a website can have a positive effect. Images however only require a small amount of code to display on a website so it is unlikely they would have any significant impact on your success.

Inbound links, why are they so important and where can you find them for best effect?

Inbound links in recent times have been the 'holy grail' in search engine optimisation. The obvious benefits of inbound links is the increased traffic owing to the number of visitors that click on the link and visit your website. The hidden benefit is more difficult to quantify but far more beneficial. It is believed that one of the main contributors to the Google Pagerank system is inbound links, with inbound links from websites with similar content believed to hold the most weight in improving your website ranking.

The curse of the blacklist, or more to the point how to keep your business off the search engine blacklists. Any tips?

The best advice to follow for avoiding the search engine blacklists is to keep your SEO techniques to a sensible level. If you think you may be 'stepping over the line', then you probably are! Keep your techniques consistent and tick as many of the 'yes' boxes as possible.

Can no-cost SEO ever be truly successful or do better placings come with increased budget?

No-cost SEO can be successful if done correctly and if evolved and worked at will benefit your rankings. However with every marketing campaign online or offline, increasing the budget will usually yield better results. But this is not always the case...

What would be your top three tips for the business looking to take the DIY approach to successful SEO?

1. Write good content with keywords cleverly placed and not overused.
2. Maximise the number of pages your website has and ensure the content and metadata is different on majority if not all of the pages.
3. Search for strong inbound links to your site from other websites with similar content.

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