• What is SEO?: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising individual web pages so that they are accessible to search engine crawlers - the search engine algorithms then translate the information collected into a ranking related to specific search terms entered into a search engine.
• Visitors (Primary Aim): Your SEO process is about helping the right kind of visitors - people you can do business with - to find your website through search engines. SEO is a numbers game where quality comes before quantity.
• Difficult: Search engine optimisation require a mixture of common sense, determination, patience, more patience, reverse engineering, statistical analysis, experimentation, and understanding the continuously changing requirements of search engines - continuous efforts will add up to ultimate success.
• Formula: No one has a quick fix formula or shortcut for how to get right to the top - if someone did have a secret recipe, the ranking system would not be credible. Effective search engine optimisation is an art.
• Time consuming: SEO is expensive because it is an extremely time-consuming, high maintenance, ongoing process. Doing it yourself will save you lots of money.
• No guarantees: Google's search engine guidelines states that submission doesn't guarantee indexing; there is no implied or explicit guarantee.
• SEO rip-offs: Watch out for SEO service providers who offer a guarantee like "Top ranking on Google for only R300" - they should be avoided - it is a process they have no control over. Also, there is no need to submit your website to thousands of search engines, only the most prominent ones. What is of more importance is doing it frequently.
• Important: SEO could be a high priority for your business if the web is key to your business's success. Paid-for search listings are particularly relevant for an online business in a competitive market as they attain prominent placings with the top search engines.

This article covers some pointers on the road to SEO success.

• Marketing objectives
• Competitive advantage
• Research top rankers keyword trends
• Keyword tools
• Create keyword-set strategy
• Brainstorm and select keywords, phrases and sets
• Incorporate keywords into
  • Original content per page
  • Original content per gateway page
  • Dynamic page keyword strategy
  • <Title> tags
  • <Meta> original description attribute (200 chars)
  • <Meta> original keywords attribute (25 words)
  • <Meta> bot attribute
  • <H>eading tags and emphasis
  • <Img> tags
  • Domain names
  • Navigation URL's
  • Links
  • File names
• Validate HTML - HTML standard
• Link external files for css and scripts
• Test pages for errors and broken links
• Link network building
  • Back links
  • Banners and adverts
  • Link exchanges
  • Directory listings
• Submission and wait period
• Keyword reservation
• Pay-per-click options - instantly effective
• SEO software
• SEO service provider

Ongoing process

These need to be done on an ongoing basis, preferably using SEO software:

• Re-submission each two weeks
• Monitor search engine placement
• Monitor visitor statistics
• Monitor referring sites
• Identify strong and weak points
• Learn about SEO and marketing
• Continue building your link network
• Adjust strategies

Looking at website statistics, you should be able to see how many visitors come from search engines. Here are some general, interesting statistics:

• 50%-80% of visitors come from search engines.
• 90% of internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for.
• 82% of all online purchases originate from search results.
• 56.3% of people are using the internet at least once a day.
• 35.1% of people use search engines at least once a day.
• 81.7% of search engine users do not read beyond the 3rd page.
• 7% or less of all internet users look beyond the first 30 results.
• Only a few search engines account for over 90% of the SE market.
• Search engines are the primary way people find websites.

Search engine algorithms are like Private Investigators who look for clues that suggest that your site is relevant to the searcher - they can't take your word for it. The major generic search engines are google.com and altavista.com.

• Role: Search engines constitute the most important motivation factors for visitors to websites.
• Purpose: Search engines operate in a highly competitive marketplace. The sole purpose of a search engine is to give their happy and loyal users relevant search results and ensure that users return for their next search and click on sponsored links.
• Credibility: For search engines to have credibility, they need to ensure that the results that they list are accurate and reflect what the searcher is looking for. Pages are ranked by computers rather than humans and therefore the actual relevance of a site can sometimes be wrong.
• Website purpose: Search engines want to understand what your site is about to help their users find what they are looking for. Each of the search engines have their own algorithms which assume a number of things as they process the text in your web pages.
• Importance: The search engine algorithms try to assess whether your website is important and useful to their users.
• Crawlers: Crawler-based search engines such as Google use bots or spiders (automated web browsers) to find web pages, make algorithmic assessments by reading the content and meta tags, follow the links and then index this information in a huge database in a way they think will be relevant to their searchers. If the page doesn't comply to the search engine criteria, the spiders will just ignore it.
• Indexing: Search engine spiders start at one website with a large number of outbound links - then they follow every link they come across, indexing each page they arrive at. Once a page has been indexed they follow all the links from that page and so on until there are no more links to follow. If a search engine can't find your site by itself, then your website doesn't have any inbound links.
• Searchers: When a search engine user performs a search typing in a keyword, the search engine uses algorithms to search through its index in its huge database to find the most relevant matches.
• Improvement: Search engines continually monitor and refine the effectiveness of their algorithms and processes and will frequently change their algorithms to improve the relevance of their search results to match their users' search needs. This may require tweaking of website designs.
• Ranking rules: Each engine has its own set of rules to determine how well a web page matches a particular query. Learning how each engine ranks pages can be a challenge, especially when they keep most of this information secret.
• Further experimentation: For a myriad of reasons you might still not get listed, or get listed beneath a much less relevant competitor - the only remedy for this is further study and experimentation.
• Secrets: Algorithms remain secret because search engines don't want website owners to unfairly influence how they are ranked.

Search engines have very busy schedules! Google indexes over 8 billion pages... so it is important to be patient. A variety of waiting periods must be endured with each search engine before there is even a hope of being listed. The payoff is great - good search engine optimisation should be effective for months.

• Unknown: The period for the submission to take effect is unknown. It is a common misconception that once your website is 'live' and submitted to the search engines, heavy traffic is on its way.
• Automated: Most search engines like Alta Vista, HotBot and InfoSeek automatically spider a site, index it and hopefully add it to their search database without any human involvement.
• Expectations: The site doesn't get registered immediately when you submit it to a search engine. Typical waiting periods for the more popular engines are between 4 weeks and 6 months. What they claim and what happens in reality is often very different.
• Resubmitting: Your site doesn't stay listed as long as it is in operation - it has to be re-submitted from time to time.
• Changes: Each time you change your site, it takes between 4 weeks to some months for the changes to take effect, therefore it is advisable to use a registration tool each time you alter your website. Track how the adjustments made impact on the rankings.
• Further refining: To refine the process further, learn about more specific criteria of important search engines.
• Varying ranks: After employing all the SEO methods, your rankings will still vary from day to day.

In the competitive Internet environment with millions of websites, achieving high rankings for specific keywords can take a very long time.

Search engines are wise to unethical SEO scams and ban the sites using it. This is important, because you are building a relationship with various search engines and certain unethical practices would damage that relationship. Your domain name will be banned by the search engine's database and it may take several years to restore the confidence.

Some of these strategies might temporarily boost your ranking, but once the search engines notice what you are doing, your site will be heavily penalised - the spiders will not submit the page, or they will knock it down the rankings, or they may ban your domain. Don't do it.

• Brand damage: Consider that you risk damaging your brand and harm your business when people realise you have tricked them into visiting your site. The implications may be harsh.
• Irrelevant keywords: Site promoters who use irrelevant, unrelated keywords risk being blacklisted by search engines.
• Blatant overuse: Keywords must not comprise more than a certain percentage of all the words on a page - if they do, there are probably some tricks and smokescreens going on.
• Excessive repetition: Do not use blatant repetition of keywords - they must be used as an integral part of the page, in links, sentences, paragraphs or headings.
• Invisible text: Do not use invisible, near-invisible, or unreadably tiny text in an effort to implant keywords into the HTML source code that are not visible to the reader.
• Duplicate content: Do not host identical or nearly identical pages - content should remain original.
• Intellectual property: Do not attract traffic using other trademarked terms that do not belong to the website owner.
• Invisible text: Do not insert text into pages that has the same colour as the background, such as white on white, to build up keyword density.
• Irrelevant information: Do not insert irrelevant keywords in the title and meta tags.
• Inaccurate listings: Do not submit your site to an inappropriate category in directories.
• Link farming: Do not participate in link farms, which is a long list of unrelated links, created to improve rankings.
• Minuscule text: Do not use minuscule text. Remember that search engines try their very hardest to see what the user sees. Writing very small text, or white text on a white background will not be visible to the user and search engines can work that out.
• Exploitation: Do not try to exploit the weaknesses in search engine algorithms.

Incorporating SEO: Develop a website to be as search engine friendly as possible, and at the same time useful to your users - finding a balance between aesthetics and SEO requirements.

General HTML Tags

• <Title> tag:

  • NB: The <title></title> tag is the single most significant page element from a search engine optimisation point of view.
  • Original: Have an original title tag for each page based on the keyword set for that web page and which succinctly describes the purpose of that page, e.g. include product name and manufacturer in the title of a product's detail web page.
  • Keywords: Include keywords in the page title by making it the most natural short sentence or description as possible.
  • Dynamic pages: If you are using dynamic pages, accurately describe page content of each individual page with a relevant, keyword-rich page title.
• HTML standard: Adhere to a coding standard such as HTML 4.01 transitional and validate every page against this standard.
• Valid HTML: Validate your pages for use in the most popular browsers which vary in their ability to interpret HTML. HTML errors can hinder spiders to index a site. Visit http://validator.w3.org for a great free HTML validator. Visit NetMechanic's HTML Toolbox - a site maintenance tool.
• <Img> - tag:

  • Add keywords/description to alt-attributes of all images in the site.
  • Alt tags don't do as much good as text.
  • Create image file names that contain keywords.
• <H>eading tags: Keywords contained in H1, H2, H3, H4, TH tags have more weight. Search engines examine how header and paragraph tags are used. A well designed web page should incorporate a heading hierarchy using <h1> and <h2> tags. It is important to include keywords in these heading tags that echo the Title tag.
• Check for errors: All web pages should be thoroughly tested using a site maintenance tool in order to catch errors in operation.
• External files: Move JavaScript, cascading style sheets to external files, remove unnecessary tags and tidy up formatting. Most spiders ignore JavaScript, VBScript, Flash and other embedded scripts/plug-ins. Frames, CGI scripts, image maps and dynamically generated pages may confuse spiders.
• Link type: Make sure links are HTML, not only JavaScript.
• Broken links: Design a logical site navigation with no broken links, which are links that point to a page which doesn't exist.
• Ideal: It is ideal that the search terms appear in the TITLE tag, the META tags, AND in the body a few times in the exact sequence as typed by the searcher.

Meta tags

• <Meta> tags: Most search engines use the <title>-tag and <description>-tag information to display information in the search results about the web page. (Google ignores the meta description tag and automatically generates a description.)
• Original content: Ensure that the description attribute of your meta tags contain original information which pertains to that specific web page.
• Rankings: Meta tags are supported by only a few crawlers and hardly worth the time to implement for ranking purposes. They are used to specify information about the page.
• Keyword-tag: The keyword atribute has to contain 25 words or phrases, with each word or phrase separated by commas.

  • Keyword case: Start a keyword with a capital letter - when a person types a word in the search with a capital, the search sometimes becomes case sensitive.
  • Keyword sorting: Put the most relevant keywords closest to the beginning of the list.
• Description-tag:
• Size: Descriptions are generally, 200 to 250 characters which may be indexed
• Position: Place the description before the keywords in the page, right after the first <HTML> tag.
• Keywords: Ensure that the keywords appear at the beginning and are repeated once if possible. Others may support it partially.
• Myth: Sorting out your meta tags is important, but it is a myth that it would make your rankings soar. When search engines first came on the scene, all they would look for was the page title, and the meta tags. This was exploited and now some search engines, such as Google and a few others, don't look at them at all.
• Spider-attribute values: You can set a value in your meta tags to tell the spiders how much time should pass before they have to revisit the site.
• Spider management: Allow only the spiders you want to visit your site access and tell unwanted crawlers to not visit your site. This is done by adding a robots.txt file containing access rules to the root directory of your website. This will also minimise traffic and help eliminate e-mail harvesters. Bandwidth: Search engine spiders browse your website just like a normal user, you may want to limit which pages they crawl, otherwhise they might end up using vast amounds of bandwidth.

Frames and Flash

• Frames in pages: Remove frames as far as possible, setting up a NOFRAMES section on each page. This tag will not affect the way a page looks but it will help a page get listed with the major search engines. The NOFRAMES tag was invented by Netscape for backward compatibility with browsers that didn't support the FRAME and FRAMESET tags. Many search engines can't spider a site with frames. The spider will index the page, but won't follow the links to the individual frames. Many search engines still have difficulty indexing sites built in frames. There is a form of frames that is acceptable called i-frames.
• Flash: Some search engines are unable to index Flash sites. It's best to build an additional HTML version to your site with a keyword dense entry page. Or use Flash in addition to your HTML siite as a header to compromise between great design and search engine performance.

Keywords, keyword sets and key phrases

Keywords are words or key phrases that users type in when they are searching for information in the search engines to find a page on your website.

• Research top rankers and keyword trends: Conduct a search of the search engines to analyse where the highest rankings of the site have materialised and which keywords are generating the best rankings. Notice which SEO practices they employed and how to outsmart them.
• Attributes survey: There is much less competition in specific phrases. Find out which of the attributes of your business offering is important to people... a colour, a size, speed, capacity, model number, book title? Research and mimic how they would look for what you offer. A more colourful description of your offering will also make it more attractive to potential buyers!
• Search histories: Many search engines make the information about what people actually typed into search engines available, which could help you decide which keywords to invest in most.
• Brainstorm: Brainstorm a short list of critical keywords that successfully reflects the pages in your website - try to think what words people are likely to use when trying to find a site like yours in a search engine. Create a list for each page which would require slightly different keywords to accurately describe it.
• Keyword sequence: Determine a popular sequence of keywords. Searching for "Cape Town Community" will have different top rankers than "Community Cape Town" so provide for the most likely sequence. If you get it right and have it repeated 3 times, it might get you to the top...
• Multitude of keywords: When there are just too many highly relevant keywords for your business, having them all on one page will dilute their relevance. Divide keywords up into smaller sets (2-5) and create pages focused on those keywords, thus providing a very strong focus to each aspect of your business, rather than no focus at all.
• Keyword sets: To widen your keyword range, target focused sets of keywords of 2+ words on specific pages. This will also help your visitors to go straight to the most relevant entry point for your site. This will also make your site much more competitive.
• Competitive keywords: Test how competitive your keywords are... if your keywords result in millions of search results then change your list to other keywords that are less competitive.
• Ideal keyword combos: Target 'high value/competitive', keywords on some pages and less competitive keywords on other pages.
• Regional spelling and words: Some American, English and South African English words have different spelling and sometimes completely different words, make sure that you cater for your target market by using the appropriate spelling, or having different versions of your website for the different spelling options. Its best to choose one option and stick to it rather than having a mixture.
• Keyword repetition: If keywords are repeated a number of times then algorithms assume that those words are going to be more relevant to the content than those that are used less often.
• Keyword location: Place most important relevant keywords as close as possible to the top the page, in the first/second paragraphs. Algorithms assume that content in the top region of a page will be a good indication as to the meaning of the page.
• Keyword proximity: The distance of the keyword to the top of the page and the distance between keywords are calculated to determine the search ranking.
• Analyse your site: Research keywords using Wordtracker and Overture to establish which phrases people might use to search for you.
• Test your pages: Several pages can be tested out on one or more engines and the pages that have the most success can be kept, while the unsuccessful pages can be dumped or revised to achieve a higher ranking.
• Keyword-laden URL's: The top ranking sites have some of the keywords within their URL. It appears obvious that Google rewards sites that contain the search terms within their URL's. Incorporate your keywords into URL strings as much as possible, having keyword-laden URLs for every page.

Content

Concentrate long and hard on creating top class relevant and comprehensive content, which is logically divided up into at least 5 subject focused pages. Follow these simple rules on how to incorporate keywords.

• Keep in mind: Remember that search engines' only aim is to provide the very best, useful, recent and relevant search results for their users.
• Focused: Focus each page with a very specific purpose and a unique set of keywords that applies exactly to that page, so that you can add those keywords naturally in the title and page heading, and repeat it at least twice in the content.
• Natural: Content must read naturally to your users - search engine algorithms try to read a page like a user would and if something is odd, they would not rank it highly.
• Secondary importance: The strange key is that search engines want to ensure that you have designed the website to best serve relevant visitors and their ability to find you in an ethical way.
• Useful content: Make sure the website content provides useful information.
• Product/Service: Include all information that is relevant so that search engines can index it accordingly. Include focused brochures, descriptions and articles.
• HTML Formatting: Incorporate a hierarchical heading-structure - these HTML heading tags can be re-formatted in your style sheets. Use <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h5>, <th>, <em>, <I>, <u>, <li>, <a> tags in a natural way on the keywords. If words are highlighted in any way, they will be scored higher.
• Keyword value: Keywords placed in the first/second paragraphs of your content, are regarded much more valuable than ones in the lower regions. Make the first two paragraphs very descriptive and concise and include your keywords wherever possible.
• Fresh content: Add new content and update old content periodically, so that your website remains relevant and valuable in the eyes of the search engines.
• Original content: Do not say the same thing in the same way on all of your pages. Original content is much more valuable in the view of the search engines.
• Gateway pages: Create original gateway pages based on the knowledge and interpretation of what each search engine is using to determine top rankings. Submit each gateway page separately to the search engines.
• Updated content: Keep your content fresh and occasionally make small changes to it so that your website appears active and relevant.
• Keyword tools: There is a nice tool on webmonkey/webtraffic to calculate how effectively you added keywords to your content.
• Lack of content: A lack of content almost always ranks poorly.

URL's/Navigation

• Domain names: The same applies, of course to domain names. However, suitable keyword-rich domain names are hard to obtain now.
• Files and directories: Create meaningful file and directory names as these could also be regarded as keywords by some search engines - this is also applicable for image names.
• Navigation URL's: Use absolute URL's (www.xyz.co.za/folder/abc.html), instead of relative paths (folder/abc.html) in navigation - the number of links found referring to your website influences your search rankings. Navigation is best repeated on every page and at the bottom of the site as well and only HTML links are considered.

Link Networks

Link building is a vital, ongoing and time consuming activity. It is essential in getting those top search engine positions.

• Link Popularity: In determining a site's ranking for particular keyword searches, most search engines consider a site's link popularity. Some links get you more points than others...
• Back links: This is the number and quality of back links or links TO your site FROM another site and it boosts ranking. Search engines assume that a quality site would want to link to other quality sites! Also remember that each time they get visited by a spider, you get visited too!
• Link exchange: This refers to putting a link on your website of another business, in exchange for them putting your link on their website. Search engines generally treat reciprocal links with less weight than links that are not part of a link exchange.
• Relevant industries: Build links to your site from websites in a similar industry to your business - these links are likely to deliver quality traffic to your site.
• Link relevance: The target website should be relevant to people who would be interested in what you have to offer. The website where you establish the link should be able to drive the right kind of traffic to your site.
• Exclusivity: If the web page that links to your website also links to many other sites, then the link-value gets diluted by some proportion. Try to get listed on a page with only a few links.
• Directory listings: Another way of establishing incoming links is to get listed in major directories such as Yahoo!, DMOZ, Google Open Directory and even industry-related directories. It can take a couple of months or longer to get listed in some directories. Refrain from listing in link farms, since it is considered as spam.
• Useful websites: In my own experience, I find that having a useful websites section boosts rankings - but I cannot explain why.
• Relevant sites: A link from a site that is very relevant, content-wise, to the content on your site, will also appeal to search engines more than links from irrelevant sites. A link is a sure sign of a page's relevancy.
• Affiliation programs: Affiliate programs help to bet back-links to your site - in some instances it could be very bandwidth-intensive if one uses proper affiliation software.
• Banner adverts: Hosting banners on websites with high rankings.

Content pages

• Information pages (I-pages): Implement one or more I-page per search word. This is a web page containing original content, which has only the essentials. Keep this page VERY small. Its function is to obtain a high ranking through focused content and, when visited, to redirect the user to your home page, or have a link to your home page.
• Page size: The page which loads the quickest (is the smallest) gets the highest ranking. This is another reason for putting scripting, style sheet coding, etc. in external documents.
• Error pages: If error pages from your site obtain high rankings - they are valuable, do not delete them... rather redirect the traffic to a valid page in your website.
• Site map page: A site map page assists spiders to find all of the pages on a site - ensure that the home page contains at least one link to the site map.

Google Sitemaps

Google offer various 'webmaster' tools to improve your site's visibility to search engines, such as sitemaps.

• Update and submit: Create your sitemaps and update them each time you add new pages to your site. Once you have submitted your sitemap, Google's spider will be sure to visit very soon - even sometimes within a few minutes or hours.
• Visitor options: When your site comes up in Google, it will show the additional links in your site map for visitors to go directly to the most appropriate page.

Pay-per-click (PPC)

Pay-per-click starts working instantaneously and is one of the most cost effective ways to acquire customers who are already looking for a business like yours.

• Conversion rate: Your conversion to sales rate will be much higher than e-mail or adverts. There is an ongoing time consuming process to follow... and results are instant.
• Keyword bidding: You bid on a word or a group of words and the more you bid, the higher up in the sponsor results listing do you get ranked.
• Cost-per-click: You pay either just per click or also for the display of your ad - in case no one ever clicks on someone's link, they still make some money for their efforts.
• Ranking: The more you pay, the higher the listing. You can guarantee that your site will appear in the top results when a user searches for certain keyword phrases.
• Reports: Every click is recorded and you can see which keywords and phrases are or aren't working from the useful reports some of these companies offer.
• Future options: The future holds pay-per-result solutions, where advertisers will pay if someone follows their link and that turns into business! And then also click-and-call offerings will link the user directly to a Skype or Google Talk address and instigate a call when clicked.
• Paid listings providers: Google, Overture.
• Keyword reservation: You can buy a high ranking by reserving a keyword and paying huge sums of money for it, which is in most cases not advisable.

Search Engine Submission

Information pages and the customer's website can submitted to search engines using SEO software, or by doing it manually on their website, or in some cases you don't have to do anything, it happens automatically, although not immediately.

• Manual: Some submissions have to be done manually to ensure the best possible results as quickly as possible.
• Automatics: To get those automatic submissions, it is important to ask other 'important' websites (with high rankings) to put a link to your site on their site - preferably on a page which has a good ranking and doesn't have lots of other external links on it. By doing this, your website will get submitted each time their website gets submitted because of the link.

SEO software and Service providers

• SEO software: Using good SEO software is a great investment for saving time in the long run. Look for SEO software that will give you the most features for your money, here are some of the features to expect in a good quality product:

  • Free/paid-for online Auto Submission: There are several online resources for auto submissions.
  • Manual submission: The software will alert you of websites which have rejected the automatic submission - these have to then be manually resubmitted individually. Some engines, like Yahoo, are best submitted individually - the software would let you know for which search engines you would be best served doing a manual submission.
  • Optimised: Find a product that optimises the SEO process for specific geographical areas, such as a specific country and/or specific languages, etc. The more specific, the better.
  • Monitoring results: The software should monitor the performance of the profile set up for the website, providing you with useful indicators of how successful it is and where improvements are required. It should provide status, history, ranking, progress, and visibility with the search engines.
  • Placements: The software needs to obtain results on the number of and distribution of the top placements in terms of the chosen keywords and key phrases.
  • Profile: Having a profile set up in the software allows for making improvements to the solution easily to achieve better performance. One also needs to follow different strategies for different pages, i.e. use different keywords.
  • Visitor activities: What are those visitors doing when they enter the site, how long do they visit each page, at which page do they enter and leave the site?
  • Page performance: Statistics could show which web pages are generating the most traffic.
  • Traffic monitoring: By looking at "Referring Sites" you can find out where visitors come from and how much traffic is being generated via search engines.
  • Search terms: You can find out which search terms are being used to find your site through search engines. Determine the most popular keywords and adjust your website's keyword strategy accordingly.
  • Frequency: Monitor the SEO software regularly - at least once every two weeks, and set it up to run automatically.
• SEO service providers: Selecting an SEO service provider requires careful thought and important decisions.

• Wordtracker: Keyword research tool.
• Overture: Keyword suggestions tool from Overture.
• Webmaster world: SEO and webmaster info.
• Google SEO Guidelines
• Validator.w3.org for a great free HTML validator.