Do You Need Search Engine Optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation is a technique for improving the ranking of your website on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing (formerly Windows Live), Alta Vista and others. I occasionally get requests from people asking if I can make their website appear on the first page or even in the first slot of a search engine.

Is this possible? More importantly, should you save your money and spend it on more conventional forms of advertising?

I'll take Google as an example, being the number one search engine for many people. Google is one of the worlds largest companies. Its survival relies on its ability to return results relevant to the search terms entered. If it could not, nobody would use it. So why do people imagine that it is so easy to fool? If it really were so easy, everyone would do it. There isn't room for eveyone on the first page.

In the early days, these engines relied on web masters providing information about the content of their sites in the form of meta tags: invisible words hidden in the website code. This quickly led to widespread keyword spamming, mainly from porn sites, so that whatever search terms you typed in, their site would be returned. It was not unusual for these sites to list hundreds of keywords in their meta-tags, and it is not a surprise that this practice no longer works. Search engines now employ very sophisticated algorithms which can quickly spot most SEO tricks. Trying them will lead to having your site blacklisted, meaning not listed at all. Even mild use of these illegitimate SEO techniques (known as "black hat") can lead to a penalization of the site's ranking.

It is rumored that Google now ignores meta-tag keywords completely and the only meta tag it pays any attention to is the description, which it might use as summary text if it matches the search terms closely enough. True keywords are found in the title and body text of your documents. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. It means that the engine is basing your website indexing on the actual information that people are going to be able to read. Why would it pay attention to any secret, hidden information?

As a web designer producing fully content managed sites, this poses a problem for me; since website owners are responsible for their own web content, I cannot control this aspect of search engine optimisation at all, except perhaps by giving timely advice. There are things that can be done: I always make sure that my websites are well laid out and well formed so that no information is hidden from indexing programs. Such legitimate SEO practices are referred to as "white hat".

There are many companies offering to submit your website to 600 search engines many times every month, at a cost of course. First, what are these 600 engines? Only a few are really worth paying attention to. Second, submission is often not necessary at all. Websites are found by "crawling" or "spidering". This is where a search engine program moves from link to link, indexing as it goes. If your site is linked from another site already known to the search engine, it will find you the next time it crawls that site. Website submission forms do exist, but rumor has it that these may do nothing, and that they only exist to give the companies concerned a quiet life. In my experience, submission does appear to work for sitemaps. But resubmitting a sitemap to a search engine that already knows about you is not going to improve your ranking. It may be helpful for informing them of a page they haven't yet crawled, which is why CMS systems such as Drupal can be set up to automatically resubmit a sitemap whenever you add new content.

So what can you do to improve your ranking? First, make sure that your page content contains words and phrases that you expect people to search on, and plenty of them. But don't go overboard or, you guessed it, you'll get penalized. If it's okay when read, it's probably okay to a search engine. Secondly, get linked. Get more high-quality incoming links to your site from other relevant sites. This is known as "link popularity". If a high-ranking site with good subject relevancy links to your site, then the assumption is that your site is good for that subject too. It helps if those links have relevant anchor text, as well. "Click here" is not very informative for indexing; "Quality Shoes" is an example of a meaningful link.

This leads me to another great way to get yourself penalized, or dropped from the listings altogether: using link farms. These are low-quality sites which contain links to hundreds of arbitrary websites and normally offer to list you in return for a reciprocal link, or worse for a fee. Just as being linked from a high-quality website will improve your ranking, so will linking to a bad site degrade your ranking. Some of these sites will allegedly get you blacklisted immediately.

A final point. Search engine algorithms are changing all the time in a constant effort to return the best results and avoid being tricked. Understandably, these companies keep their techniques very close to their chests. This means there is no blueprint for SEO improvements to your site. In summary, the best advice I can give is, do not try to do anything "tricky". Produce a good quality site, with clear, relevant content. Make sure the markup validates and get links from other appropriate high quality sites.

Oh, and search engines favour fresh, regularly updated content, so it's a good idea to write a blog or similar.