Search Engine optimization

Provided your products or services are suitable for marketing or promoting on the web, professional Search Engine optimization is liable to be the most profitable investment you can make.

Let's say your unique selling point is that you provide fresh-caught fish to deprived areas such as Bearsden and Milngavie (near Glasgow). As a potential customer, I might type fresh fish bearsden into the Google search box. Because I didn't use quotation marks around "fresh fish," I get nearly 13,000 results.

In this peculiar case, being somewhat desperate, I might be quite happy to trawl through all 13,000 results to find what I'm looking for but, mostly, people will follow the links they find on the first or second pages. If your site has been properly optimized, it will have the potential to come up at or near the top of the first page. That's the theory.

SEO focuses, therefore, on the keywords that your customers might use in the hope of finding your site but the Search Engines have their own agenda and it's in understanding and anticipating that agenda that the real expertise lies.

Relevance and "Importance" Consider the problems facing the search engines. If Google fails to return pages that are really relevant to our searches we won't waste any time moving to a more reliable search engine. Google uses a complex algorithm to determine both the relevance of the page content to the search terms and its "importance" in the great scheme of things.

Broadly speaking, if the page content is genuinely relevant to the page title, keywords, and description meta tags (which should be found near the top of every web page HTML code), then the page gets some brownie points. The "importance" of the page, however, is a more difficult thing for a machine to evaluate.

Google gets around this by making an assumption: if an important site such as, for example, NASA or the Whitehouse links to your site, you must have something interesting to say (actually, strike the Whitehouse; let's keep this on a more serious level... Disney.com). Likewise, if a very large number of indifferent sites are linking to yours, there must still be something there of general interest. If you download the Google Toolbar, you will be able to see how Google ranks your site in terms of its importance.

What Every Search Engine Wants In the early days of SEO, the phrase "Content is King" was coined and it's still true today. If your site has very little in the way of text content or if you have only a few inbound links, it will be difficult to achieve a good position in the Search Engines. SEO expertise, therefore, involves an understanding of what the search engines want.

At its best, good SEO doesn't try to trick the search engines into placing a false value upon a site. It "optimizes" the site's potential to be recognised by the machine in terms of both the site's intrinsic and extrinsic value so that, when I type "fresh fish" bearsden, Google helps me find what I want (and saves me the expense of moving house to Inverbervie).

Search Engine optimization for ecommerce

The pages on e-commerce and content management system web sites are dynamically generated from the database i.e. the page content - the text and images - can change as a result of the visitor's interaction with the page. This page, on the other hand, has unchanging "static HTML" content; it has no underlying functionality and complexity.

optimization of a static HTML page is, therefore, a more direct and controlled business than that of bringing SEO to an e-commerce site.

A Masonhost-installed e-commerce site comes with some SEO features implemented, as standard, such as search-engine-friendly URLs and dynamic meta tags, but it is good practice to have at least one professionally optimized static html index page on the top level of your web site.

[The 'top level' web pages are those that do not reside within folders in your home directory. For example, www.masonhost.co.uk/index.html is a 'top level' page, whereas www.masonhost.co.uk/shop/index.html resides inside the shop folder.]

The top level page, being plain html (rather than dynamically generated from the database), can be designed with 'cleaner' html code and with a professionally arranged distribution of appropriately tagged keywords and links to pages within the cart.

Search Engine optimization is a specialist field and I would highly recommend budgeting for between at least £300 and £600 for professional SEO work. Assuming your products or services are suitable for marketing on the web, professional SEO is the most cost-effective investment that you can make.

Another recommendation, if you're serious about making your web site work for you, is to take an interest in SEO. SEO is not just a matter of paying for an expert to optimize a site then sitting back to reap the benefits. If you can make the time, it's something to which you, the site owner, can can make an immense contribution, and on an ongoing basis. The first step is to acquire an understanding of the fundamentals and I can't think, offhand, on a better introduction to SEO than Google's own Search Engine optimization Starter Guide. Assuming your site has been constructed for optimal SEO potential, you can continue to improve its pulling-power by acquiring more inbound links. As more sites link to yours, the potential for an increase in your site's Google Page Rank will increase while the possibility of cutting your company's advertising and marketing budget will become, increasingly, a reality.