Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process that can be explained in two parts: relevance and quality. Relevance is determined by onsite factors such as content and image descriptions etc. and quality is determined by links.
Returning relevant results is the main goal of a search engines. This is why you must get your onsite SEO up to scratch – a few things to consider are:
1. An optimum length page title is around 70 characters long and words at the front of the title will rank higher (relatively speaking). The longer your title gets, the less effect the words added will have. This means you should only concentrate on 3 or 4 phrases per page; from this you can outline a landing page strategy.
2. An optimum meta description tag is around 120 characters.
3. Link title attributes can have quite a big effect at present.
4. Try to get as much copy on a page as is appropriate, to increase changes of your page being seen as relevant to the terms you want to target.
The relevance of a page is weighted against the pages’ quality. This is determined by links. If lots of other sites are linking to yours then it must be high quality. Quality sites with quite good relevance can rank higher than very relevant sites with poor quality (few links). One way links are better than links that are reciprocated, as this looks more natural; it looks like you haven’t just swapped links for SEO purposes. Ways to gain one-way links:
1. Interesting blog posts (like this I hope!)
2. Online PR and article submissions
3. Submitting to free and paid directories
4. General link baiting through use of competitions, amusing videos etc etc!
Right, I hope I have explained a few things to those who know nothing about SEO!
This was a guest post by Richard Lawrence of Blueclaw, an SEO company in Leeds.
