Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - A Beginners Guide
Search engine optimisation (SEO) can be a minefield for marketing professionals. It is a relatively new form of marketing and as it has stemmed from a largely technical industry, there is a broad range of services being offered by consultants and agencies across the world.
For a marketing professional, this can mean you need to wade through lots of information - some of which can be confusing or misleading - in order to secure services for your business or your client.
This guide covers the basics of search engine optimisation which will help you understand it as a concept (which is a very important step to take). At a later date we will cover some more indepth issues and possibly look at creating a buyer’s guide for your reference.
What is search engine optimisation (SEO)?
The basic principle of SEO is to develop your website in such a way as to:
- Be fully indexed by search engines
- Rank well for selected key phrases
This is achieved by targeting specific pages on your website to specific key phrases. So for example, you would have one page for “marketing news” and another for “technology news”. These pages should eventually rank well on major search engines for searches for “marketing news” and “technology news” respectively.
How is this achieved?
Search engines look at each page of a website individually and analyse various “on page” factors – the point of this is to determine what the page is about and how to subsequently rank the page for searches (compared to other similar pages).
There are hundreds of factors taken into account during this process, which range from the content with page title and Meta information, on page content, links point to the page, HTML mark up (bold, italics, heading tags, etc).
Sites should be designed with “best practice” SEO in mind, which is basically a middle ground between two excesses. Too little “optimisation” means that the work carried out is ineffective – too much means that search engines could view it as an attempt to spam (or “cheat”). This is why it is vital to carefully manage oyur approach to SEO.
You may notice that different sites manage these factors differently – that’s down to a personal choice of their SEO strategist. However, SEO should be considered in terms of what will work in the long term and not just what works right now.
The fine line…
The SEO industry has traditionally been split between two camps – ethical SEO (or “white hat”) and unethical SEO (or “black hat”). While both methods are based on the same principles of on page optimisation, each carries varying benefits and risks as outlined below:
As can be seen here, an ethical strategy is the only real choice for a viable business online – unethical approaches all run an incredibly high risk of being penalised by search engines, which is no use to a business planning to be online in 5, 10, 15 or 50 years time.
The grey area
Modern day SEO has become more blurred – “spam” or unethical approaches aren’t as easy to spot, giving the illusion that “tricks” can be a viable approach to SEO. Generally though, most business focused SEO has fallen into an area of “Grey hat” SEO.
While black and white SEO can be easily defined (search engines like white hat SEO, but don’t like black hat SEO), grey hat SEO can pull elements from both areas. However the same risks and benefits outlined above still apply – certain techniques carry more risk and others carry more benefit in the long term (but can take longer to achieve).
Personally, I position my work at the “white hat” side of SEO – while this means that results do take a little longer to achieve, the long term benefits for the site are the most appropriate approach to take for a big business marketing strategy.
Understanding this market can help you understand why competitor sites approach SEO differently and while some may be achieving some search engine success just now, their approach shouldn’t be undertaken by you – they run a much greater risk of being banned from search engines while you won’t.
An example of the difference can be seen from this diagram:
Why this is important
Search engines regularly update the way they rank websites – the key change in terms of SEO is that techniques that once “worked” may no longer do so – sites that ranked well using borderline unethical techniques can find themselves (overnight) on the wrong side of the border…
Last word on SEO
There’s a lot of information on forums and blogs about SEO. Most of it is rubbish. These days there is very little useful information to be had in the public domain – most of the “information” posted on forums and blogs come from people with 1, maybe 2 years experience in SEO or from those with a very limited professional and market experience.
Try to take information you read on public sites with a pinch of salt – after all, SEO is a multi billion pound industry worldwide – how many people will really give away all the secrets for free?
I’ll follow this article up at a later date with some information on buying SEO services. If anyone is interested in keeping up to date with some other of my posts on SEO, feel free to check out my blog at Fused Nation.
-Marketing Guy