This article is not written by me, but its one my fav article as it helped me in the start of my career a lot. Hope the same way it would help some of you too.
Guide to getting your site in to the search engines
This guide is aimed at those people with a limited budget and no prior knowledge of “Search Engine Optimisation”, or “SEO” – most likely people running small businesses who want to get their website in the search engines. The immediate goal of any SEO project is to get your website to appear in the search engines for relevant terms. Having said that the ultimate goal of any SEO project is to bring more business, sales or leads to your business.
Goals of the Search Engines
The search engines, such as
Google, Yahoo and MSN are all competing for your business. When you visit a search engine and type in your search you want the most relevant sites at the top of the results. If you searched for “classical music” and got a list of sports results you would most likely try a different search engine.
So the ultimate aim of each search engine is to get the best possible results for their clients, who are those people that perform searches. This guide will aim to give you some techniques to help your site come high up the results, but be warned, if your site doesn’t deserve to be top, then you face an uphill struggle.
Spiders / Robots
The search engines have programs often called spiders that follow links on websites to crawl the pages on the web. Once the spider has followed a link to your page the search engine can add it to its index. This is a huge database that it reads when a user submits a search.
A search engine retrieves the pages from its index that match the user’s search. Once the search engine has a list of pages it uses very complicated and secret algorithms to rank the pages, from the most relevant to least relevant.
Links
Links are the life and soul of the Internet. Because a link encourages people to visit your website, you can think of a link as being like a vote for your website. The (vastly simplified) theory is that the more votes (links) you have the more people like your site, therefore the more the search engines should trust what you have to say. Since the search engines are all trying to provide relevant and quality results they only want your site to be top if people think it is good. Put simply, the way they know if it is good is by the number of people who link to you.
Links from relevant sites are important as they provide targeted traffic. If a potential client of yours is browsing the web and they stumble across a site related to your business, with a link to your website, this could really help you.
If, on the other hand, a potential client was browsing a site about something entirely unrelated to your business then a link to your website is unlikely to be that beneficial to you. The search engines use the number of links to your website and where the link comes from (if it is relevant or not) along with a measure of trust (do they trust the site linking to you) to determine where your website should come for any user’s search.
The more relevant links you can get to your website the better.
Search words
The final bit of background is keyword research, or put simply, “what will people looking for my website search for”. You should have in the back of your mind what you think people will search for when they want to find your website.
Existing clients may use your business name, but potential clients won’t know this yet. If you offer a service, such as cleaning, some people will search for this, some would search for cleaners, some may refine the search to help get more relevant results. For example I might search for “small office cleaners central london”.
It would take a guide a lot bigger than this one to cover everything about keyword research and ensuring you have chosen the best keywords. If this is something you are worried about do get in touch and we will point you in the right direction.
A quick word of warning: you should be realistic about these key phrases. It might be nice to be top for a generic search, such as “cleaning”, but until you are a national company this may not have the impact that you might think it would (and it would take a lot of effort and would most likely require specialist help). You would be better placed ranking well for “cleaning london” (replace london with wherever your business is!). The people searching for this are pre-filtered and are therefore more likely to buy from you. Always keep your business in mind and think about what is most likely to bring you more money.
What can you do
There are a number of things that you can do yourself to help your website rank well. This guide will take you through some of the basics that you can do that don't require too much technical knowledge.
Write content that deserves to be top
If you only take one thing away from this guide let it be this: the easiest way to come top for your search term is to have a web-site that deserves to be top. If you wrote the best article on “office cleaning techniques” then, by following these few steps, you should find your page ends up towards the top of the search engines.
The great advantage of deserving to be top is that you don’t have to worry about what happens if the search engines change their secret algorithm. If you truly deserve to be at the top any change to the algorithm is likely to leave you at the top, or at the very least, it will quickly work out you should be top and re-order the results.
What should I write about?
Unfortunately we can’t tell you what you can do to deserve your high ranking, though your clients will have a few ideas. For example, the reason we wrote this document is because a lot of our clients asked us for it.
When you are writing try to be specific. This guide is aimed at those people with a limited budget and no prior knowledge of “search engine optimisation”, it wasn’t written to help people who have prior knowledge and experience or who have budget to spend on getting someone else to optimise their site for them.
Writing an essay or article is not the only way to achieve good rankings. What the page contains is entirely up to you, and is limited only by what you believe deserves to be top. Perhaps you have a database of information that no-one else has. This is certainly something that could deserve to be top.
Finally write something you are passionate about. If you don’t believe in what you are saying people won’t believe you.
Optimise the content
Once you have written your content, there are a few additional things you should do to help the search engines. You should ensure that your page has a title (the bit in the blue bar at the top of Internet Explorer) that is relevant to that specific page. This means that each page on your site should have a different title, unless of course all your pages are about the same thing, which they hopefully aren’t.
You should split your content up into sections, in the same way you would if you were writing any document. The headers of each section help to tell the search engines what the content is about, so make sure they are descriptive.
If you have something important to say make sure your visitors and the search engines know it is important. You can do this by putting it in italics or by making it bold to make it stand out.
Tell people about it
One key variable is the number and quality of links that point to you. The next stage is very much like a mini PR campaign, and is much easier if what you are promoting is good quality. The goal of writing your content is to get people to read it, and preferably link to it. Once you have your new content on your website, you should start publicising it. Speak to your clients, and people in your local network. Hopefully it is something that they find interesting – encourage them to read it and pass it on to other people in their network.
You can also try talking to influential people in your business. If you regularly read any blogs that are relevant to your business they will probably be interested in what you have written (if you haven’t found out about blogs yet, try signing up for a free account at bloglines (
www.bloglines.com) and subscribing to some blogs – you can get a wealth of interesting information regularly for free).
Sites such as
reddit, digg and [delicious] (
http://del.icio.us) all have links to recently created (or publicised) content. You should try to submit your new page of content.
There are many different ways to publicise new content. Your goal is to get it in front of as many people as possible, some of these will read it and pass it on to others, some may link to it, and some may just contact you to see if there is anything you can do to help their business.
Linking to other websites
Often people ask us whether they should link to other people's websites. This is unlikely to affect your website's rank, and so you should ask yourself if the link helps the people who read your website. If it helps them, then by all means link to them. If it doesn’t help your visitors, then unless there is another compelling reason to you probably shouldn’t.
Reciprocal links (i.e. where you link to one site in exchange for them linking to you), in most cases don’t help you rank well, as the search engines can work out that you are probably only doing it as an attempt to boost your rankings.
Other strategies
There are other ways of getting visitors to your website. In particular, you can buy adverts in a number of places online in order to drive more people to your website.
Many of these are things you can buy and manage yourself but they are outside the scope of this document. Get in touch with us if you want more information.
Checklist
Here is a simple checklist (easier said than done, but nobody said this would be easy):
- Have you written some original, specific content about your area of expertise?
- Have you ensured your search words are in the title, headers and bold text?
- Have you told everyone you can think of who might be interested?
- Do you think it deserves to be top for appropriate search words?
Troubleshooting
Some people find that their site is not appearing in the search engines at all. If this is the case, then regardless of the quality of your content, you will struggle!
There are a number of technical reasons that could cause this. The first step in troubleshooting the problem is to go to Google and type site:mydomain.com into the search box (e.g. we would type site:wandd.net). This will tell you what pages Google knows about on your site. If you get some results, but not the new page, you most likely need to encourage Google to spider the new page – this is best done by getting some fresh links to your site. If your site is in frames (ask us), you may find that the search engine spiders can’t get to your inside pages and you probably need a web designer to take a look at your site.
If you get no results at all, either you don’t have enough other sites linking to you to have got onto the radar of the search engines or there are technical problems stopping your site from being found by the search engine spiders.
