4success

Search Engine Optimisation "SEO" is the activity required to prepare a site for submission to search engines and directory services and ensuring the site is prepared in a manner that allows it to get the best ranking where possible in search result returns.

The following provides a quick overview of some aspects of SEO.

The days when "SEO" was simply a matter or stuffing in some keywords and a description in the meta tags of your web site and being assured that you would get a high ranking have gone. Why is this?

• There are many more sites / pages.
• The search engines have changed the way they determine the best pages for a search result.
• Search engine algorithms have become much more complex.
• Preferred search engines have changed it used to be Yahoo - now it is Google.
• Peoples search patterns have changed - as opposed to single words they now use phrase to get more targeted results.

With these changes is SEO still important - DEFINITY, however results can not be 100% guaranteed. Although with some thought and work, your site rankings can be improved for targeted searches.

We'll take you through quickly through some steps which will help prepare your site for SEO.

Step 1/ Know you site and your customers.

Step 2/ Understand your product and service offering to your customers.

Step 2a/ Choose a two to four word phrase you think most customers would enter into a search engine if looking for your product or service offering.

Step 2b/ Test it in search engines and check your competitors and own sites results. Understand competitors targets and adjust your selection until you are happy to apply them to your site.

Step 3/ Describe clearly and accurately your product or service offering to potential customers with between 25 to 30 words. Make sure you are thinking from your customers point of view - not your own!

Does the description include the words in step2? - if not then it should.

If it does move to the next step.

Step 4/ Choose 25 to 30 keywords which might be used to reflect the product and service offering from your site. These are likely to be secondary or alternative words used to describe you products or services and should include the words selected in step 2a/. Also check your competitors to see what them are using.

Step 5/ Once you have settled on

• 2 - 4 word targeted phrase.
• 25 - 30 word description.
• 25 - 30 keywords.

You are now ready to apply these to you site. These need to be carefully integrated into your content. In terms of wording within the site, and careful placement in pages titles, links and section headers etc.

Step 6/ Construct your site around a domain which uses the words selected in step 2a/ -

Step 7/ Submit to search engines.

Step 8/ Regularly review results for your site and your competitors. If necessary go back to Step 1 and redo as required.

There are a number of other issues which need to be addressed to improve your SEO ranking:

1. Exchange links from other sites.
2. Internal links within site.
3. Search engine readability. (Google site map)
4. Search engine and directory submissions.
5. Site construction tools / techniques need to be search engine friendly.
6. Amount and appropriateness of site content.
7. With database driven sites ensure SEO friendly linking system is used.

The area of SEO is very dynamic and changing on an on going basis, so what applies today may not be the rule tomorrow. So you need to review and adjust on a regular basis.

To review some SEO successes we have achieved for our clients.

Try the following search phrases in google: