Search Engine Success through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This article is intended to provide guidance on how to set up sites to get good results from the search engines.

We also recommend you visit Search Engine Success to find out a little more!

The best results come from knowing your business, monitoring your competitors and from regularly refining your web site pages. Epsilis are pleased to assist in this process if required however the recurring nature of the process may mean that some clients will feel they get better value for money if they take responsibility for their own search engine marketing efforts. This article is intended to assist clients in understanding the issues.

  1. The basic facts:
    The competition
    If you are selling the same thing as many others you need to stand out from the crowd - in web terms the potential competition is everyone in the world doing what you do with a web site and standing out from the crowd means coming up on the first page (first 10 places) of a search. If your business is reasonably unique this will be easy, otherwise it may not be realistic to expect to get a top ranking unless you pay to get one
    '.. listed on 500 plus search engines...'
    If you have a web site you have probably had dozens of emails offering to get you listed on many search engines. There are only a handful of widely used search engines - there are thousands of lists of web sites attempting to fill a perceived need. Most are unlikely to have any real impact on most sites. These services are automated - in that a standard set of data is sent to each of a long list of search engines. This is ok for the minor search engines but the main ones are too important to be dealt with generically. For these you are best advised to make a tailored submission and deal with any issues reported
    The major search engines tend to work differently
    Therefore setting up a site to get the best results from one search engine may result in doing poorly on others
    Results don't always come quickly
    Typically search engines work on a monthly cycle so your site is unlikely to get listed quickly. Some offer the option to pay a one off inclusion charge to get a listing in a matter of days. Some people find that they have to submit their site to the search engines month after month before they get a listing
    Things change
    - all your competitors with a web site may be trying to improve their search engine ranking. To become successful and remain successful is likely to be an ongoing task
    According to StatMarket report Feb 2002 -
    7-8% of site traffic comes from search engines - 52% come from people knowing your url and 41% from links from other web sites. However don't let this put you off search engines, they can be a valuable source of new visitors
  2. Different types of Search engines:
    Directories
    submissions are vetted by people (so you site may not be accepted or may take a long time to be listed) and you likely to get only one listing. Yahoo is usually considered to be the most popular and is the hardest to get listed in (a statistic I have seen quoted is that only 40% of submissions result in a listing). Submission is free to their non-commercial categories and fee based to their commercial categories. (Note Submission is charged for regardless of whether you get listed). Another important directory is the Open Directory
    Crawlers
    Crawler-based search engines visit web pages to compile their listings automatically so you can get a different listing for every page on your site in theory. Google is generally regarded as the most important

    The major Directories and Crawlers are described here http://searchenginewatch.com/links/major.html

  3. Prepare your website

    Rule number one - The website content must be useful otherwise it is not going to work no matter how effective your search engine listing is

    For Keywords think Keyphrases

    • Don't think of keywords as single words. People seldom type a single word into a search engine because this returns too many irrelevant results. Therefore make a list of short phrases that people might type in that are relevant to your site
    • Try out your phrases in the search engines to evaluate the sites that currently come up - are they relevant to your site or are a lot of irrelevant sites found. If people put in a search and a lot of irrelevant sites come up they are not likely to use those search results. If the results are relevant you are on the right lines
    • You can try out your ideas for Keyphrases and find alternative more specific ones using the tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
    • You can see what keyphrases your competitors are using the keyword density analyser at http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm
    • Geography - is location important, if it is make sure it is in your Keyphrases
    • Think about the different pages on your site - each page ideally should have it's own set of Keyphrases that are relevant to the content on that page
  4. Meta data tags

    These are hidden html tags on each web page. They are important to get a good ranking on many crawler based search engines. Also typically the page Title Tag (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag get displayed on search results. (They are updatable in the later versions of our Inabox or epecentre content management consoles.)

    The page Title Tag
    • All your most important keyphrases should be in the Title Tag. The first sentence of your Title Tag should be "human readable" (as the first few words are displayed in the browser title bar), the rest can be just a list of keyphrases.
    • The best advice at the moment seems to be keep the Title Tag relatively short say under 20 words to avoid the search engines deciding the page is a "spam page."
    The Meta Description Tag
    • A short description of the web-page. (You can edit the one from the Title Tag to make it human readable.)
    • Keep it between 100 and 200 characters.
    The Meta Keywords tag
    • Enter your keyphrases in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don't repeat a keyphrase, and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times (some search engines may penalize you for more than 5). The exceptions are words like "the", "in", "a", "and" etc. Most search engines ignore these.
    • If you have a lot of keyphrases that are relevant to your site, spread them out on the most relevant pages
    • Use the most important keyphrases on your homepage
    • Commas - some search engines pay attention to the commas, some treat them as "white-space". So just use commas as appropriate, but don't waste a character putting a space after the comma
    • Capitalize words as you might expect people to normally use them. Most search engines will ignore the capitalization. Keep it between 200-400 characters.
    The page content
    • The first paragraph of your page should expand upon your meta tags. Repeat your keyphrases but in human readable form
    • Expand all your text references on a page to match the keyphrases. In normal text editing you have probably mentioned the full phrase once then dropped words. The crawler only sees a phrase that partially matches so ranks your page lower. Eg Web Designers may get shortened to Designers on subsequent references.
    • You don't want your keyphrases to appear too many times, because that might make the search engines think your page is a spam page. Over 10 is probably too many (including meta tags and page content)
  5. Build Links
    • Search engines analyse links to your site from other sites as means of determining if your site is good for the topic in question. Link analysis is not all about numbers although popularity is good, links from good sites are better (in the eyes of the crawler - ie sites the crawler ranks highly)
    • See our feature on Link Popularity and Link Building Suggestions
  6. Submit Your Site
    • Submit the page (or perhaps the 2 or 3 pages) that best summarize your web site. (Submitting 2 or 3 alternative pages is a precaution in case the search engine has trouble reaching one of the pages from which to begin its crawl around the links on your site). A site map page with text links to everything in your web site is a good page to submit to the search engine
    • Submit your site manually to the most important search engines - each may need a slightly different submission and you can see if there are any problems reported
    • It can take a month or so for your pages to appear in a search engine
    • Advice on getting a successful submission to Yahoo and the other major Directory Search Engines can be found here http://www.selfpromotion.com/yahootips.t
  7. Verify And Maintain Your Listing
    • Check on your pages and ensure they get listed
    • Once your pages are listed, monitor your listing regularly. If your site disappears resubmit
    • If your site changes significantly - resubmit - search engines should revisit on a regular schedule. However, some visit less often if your site doesn't change very often
    • Review site stats reports to see how you are performing

The tips in this article are based on studying various guides. In particular we credit the following sites as key sources of information:

September 2002