According to Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. SEO could be considered a subset of search engine marketing.

Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages, such as paid advertisements, and organic search results. Search Engine Optimisation, however, is primarily concerned with improving the position of a website on a search engine result page when certain keywords are entered and a search is performed. If a website achieves a good position in a search engine, both the number and the quality of visitors to a website may be increased.

Marketing Matters offer Search engine optimization as a stand-alone service in West Lothian. If we have developed your website, we provide initial search engine optimisation as standard to make sure that your website is indexed in the major search engines, such as Google, MSN, Yahoo. SEO is a lot more effective when the optimisation is incorporated into the initial development and design of a website.

My website is indexed… What does that mean? It simply means that Google, MSN, Yahoo has listed your website, i.e. these search engines have created an entry on their search pages. Indexing simply means a search engine knows about you and might show your search engine when a very specific search is carried out – for example a search that includes your company name. Not many people will know your company name though.

A listing does not determine the position in the list though – i.e. the Ranking on the Search Engine Result Pages. If you enter a generic search phrase and your website comes up amongst the first 10 results, then your Ranking is very high. But if you only appear between entries 1000 and 2000 – your ranking is very poor, not many people go through so many search engine result pages until they arrive at the page where a link to your website is listed.

Search Engine Optimisation works mainly on your Ranking and regular SEO should improve your ranking when your most important search terms are displayed.

What do I need to optimise my website for?

• What website visitors are you after?
• Do you want to raise awareness about your product?
• Do you want to sell online?
• Do you just want to be found if someone looks for a business like yours in your area?

You need to have a goal for your Search Engine Optimisation. What do you want to achieve? For example, if you are a wedding photographer, you might want your website to be displayed in Google when someone enters “wedding photographer Edinburgh” or “portrait photographer Scotland“. Click on the two links to see where his website is currently listed. If you provide a local service, you can use this to your advantage by simply optimising your website to include lots of mentions of the local area, such as Edinburgh, Dundee, Fife, etc. By optimising his website for local searches, you are likely to receive a lot of local enquiries.

How long will it take until my site is No 1?

We are asked this question often when we develop or re-design a new website. No-one can give you a time frame for this. No-one can give you any guarantees. There are a lot of companies out there that claim they get you to No 1 in Google within a week. What they don’t tell you is what keywords they use and baffle the unknowing person with. If your company is called “EazyPeazy” for example, and is located in Dundee, then this company will get you to No 1 in Google within a week and they will enter the words “EazyPeazy Dundee” and Voila you are No 1. That does not help you though, because a) you are a new business – no-one knows your company name, b) it does not take any of your website content into consideration, c) all they have done is indexed your website, but your ranking is really non-existent.

If you offer some obscure thing only people with specialist knowledge know about and if you don’t have (m)any competitors, your Google ranking can be very good within a very short time – because there are not so many pages to compete with. But if you offer something that is well-known and where there is a lot of competition, it might take you a considerable amount of time until you appear anywhere in the first 10 pages of a search engine. “A considerable amount of time” can mean anything up to 6 months or even longer.

The following page contains links to some very useful SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tools and a short explanation of what they do.

PageRank Tool – enter a URL and find out the PR of the website (this will take you away from the MM website!):

Google Trends – enter a key phrase – for example “Marketing Agency” and Google will tell you how the key phrase developed over the years.

Keyword Density Tool – this will detect the keyword density on your website. A density of 2-4 % is regarded as good.

If you have had your business for a number of years, think back to when you started: it probably took about six months to a year to get your business going, for calls to come in regularly, for enquiries to come in, for customers to come back wanting more, or for customers to recommend your services to someone else.

If your website has just gone live and if you have not paid for online advertising such as google adwords or any other form of advertising, it is unlikely for enquiries to flood in.

Your website needs time to establish itself on the web. This does not happen over night or in the space of a week or a month.

You need to imagine your website to be a brand-new island in the big ocean. You have just made the island accessible and added an airport as well. No-one knows, however, that there is a new island, therefore, no-one will fly there. The reason for this is because you have not implemented any flight routes from other islands to fly to you. You need to do a lot of work to speak to the other islands around you – especially the big ones – that there is a new island which is worth “flying to”. You need to establish new routes that go to your island. By “routes” I mean “links” – web links that is. You need to find islands / websites – which provide a similar kind of service or a complementary service to what you have on offer. If, for example, your business is wedding photography, you want to establish links with suppliers of wedding stationery, wedding supplies, wedding cakes and so on. You also want to establish links with photography related websites.

When you buy a photography magazine, usually at the back of the magazine you will find a number of pages full with advertising. These pages are targetted at people with an interest in photography – the very same person who just bought the magazine. The advertisers who sell photography-related equipment (such as backdrops, flash guns, photography training, software) will have a much bigger chance to being noticed by the person who bought the magazine than an advertiser who wants to sell garden hoses, for example. Therefore, the advertiser of garden hoses will not get much business from advertising in a photography magazine.

If you decide to advertise in a photography magazine, you will probably want to advertise in a magazine which is read by many photographers in the country. You will look for the biggest magazine there is in order to maximise impact of your advert.

You need to do the same thing with your website links. You need to find the big “islands” – the big websites – and ask them to place a link on their website which points to your website. You should also offer them a link in return – from your website to their website (this is called reciprocal linking). Sometimes, websites, in particular directories, charge money for a link to be placed on their pages. This fee can be a one-off fee or an annual fee. These fees can vary greatly between £10 and £150 or even more. You need to check out the PageRank and popularity of these websites and evaluate if it is worth paying a fee for your link to be included.

How do I know if a website is worth having a link exchange with?

If you have Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox on your PC, you should download the Google Toolbar and install it in your browser. The toolbar will be displayed at the top of the browser, and apart from having a search box, it will give you much information about how websites are rated in Google (please see image below).

If the toolbar is istalled, for any website you visit, the toolbar will tell you the PageRank of that website. PageRank is Google’s idea of determining the relevance and popularity of certain website. The higher the PageRank, the more relevant and popular a website is regarded by Google. This relevance is calculated with the quality of content on a website and with the number of quality links that point to a website. A quality link is a link from a website with a high PageRank (PR higher than 3 or 4 for example). You can read more about Google PageRank on the Google Website.

Back to our wedding photographer example: you want to have links pointing to your website that come from related websites, ie. websites which offer wedding-related products and/or services. Furthermore, the website that places a link to your website should be highly regarded by Google, it should therefore have a high PR.

How long does it take for my website’s PR to increase?

When your website goes live, it will have a PR of 0 because Google does not know anything about it. Over time, probably during the first 6 months of your website going live, your PR will increase because it has been indexed by Search Engines and the number of links that point to your website is slowly but steadily growing.

Bear in mind, that building link relationships with other websites takes a lot of time. Even though you might have sent away 50 e-mails to potential link exchangers, chances are that only 5-10 will reply and actually place a link which points to your website. Sometimes, you will receive a reply within a short number of days, sometimes you may receive a reply after 3 months.

How do I know how many links point to my website?

This is simple: Go to www.google.com and enter link:www.mydomain.co.uk
Google will then tell you the exact number of links that Google knows about that point to your website. The more links Google knows about the better. If you have 5 links pointing to your site, it’s a start. If you have 50 links pointing to your site, you are getting there. If you have 500 links out there – you can claim to be an expert.

Why do I need links on my own website? I don’t want my visitors to leave my website!

You need to have a links page on your website. If you ask other websites to link to yours, it is only fair to offer a reciprocal link in return. However, you don’t want to place a button in your main navigation that says “Links” or “Useful Links”. You can “hide” the link to your links page on your sitemap or in the footer, for example. The links page is only partly meant for your website visitors, but more for Search Engines. You website will get indexed by Google a lot faster if a link on a high-traffic website points to your website. If you fill in the Google Submit Website form, it can take months for your website to be indexed by Google. So don’t bother…!

If Google or other search engines crawl a high-traffic website and find a link pointing to your website, the search engine will follow this link and discover “there is a new website which is not in my database yet”. The search engine will then index your website’s homepage, which means it will add a small amount of information about your website to their database. This small amount is sufficient enough for your website to be found in the Search Engine. However, your website will only come up in the top results when you enter a very specific search term, such as “Bob Kowalski Wedding Photographer Edinburgh” for example. It is unlikely for your website to come up on page one of the Search Results if you only enter “wedding photographer” or “wedding photographe Edinburgh”.

Over time, the search engine will come back to your website and index your sub pages too. Bear in mind, that indexing has nothing to do with ranking! Indexing means that the search engine is aware of the existence of your website. Even though your website might not come up when you enter “wedding photographer”, it might be displayed when you enter a more specific term, for example “wedding photographer Robert Smith Edinburgh” (if that is your name and if this name and the word “Edinburgh” appear on your homepage on several occasions).

If you want to work on your Search Engine Ranking, you need to optimise your website for the keywords you want your website to be displayed in Search Engines and you need to establish link relationships. The more links that point to your website the more relevant Google and other Search Engines think your website is.

With all the information above you should get an idea of why you cannot have online enquiries or sales within a very short time of going live.

If you don’t want to spend money on online advertising and expect to make thousands within a matter of days, you will be disappointed.

Be first in Google from DAY 1 of going live

In order to be first in Google, you can check out Google Adwords. You can pay Google (and other search engines) to display your advert if someone enters a certain key phrase in the search engine. Your customised advert will then be displayed above the normal results or on the right-hand side of the browser. Some people will never click on sponsored links though. Sponsored links can help you to get noticed online, but they can cost a substantial amount of money. You should work on your normal “organic” listing and try to optimise your website for your most important key phrases (for example “wedding photographer Edinburgh”).

The development of a decent position in Google for your most important key phrases is not something a web developer can “sort out” for you in a matter of days. It’s a time-consuming task which has to be repeated over time. Link building, optimising content, updating your website can all help to improve your ranking, but it won’t happen over night.