Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is not as complicated as some people might like you to believe. However, that does not mean it’s easy – it will require some effort to get it right.

When we talk about Search Engine Optimisation, what we really mean is ‘Google’ optimisation. Google has about 74% of the search engine market share in the UK.

More than ever it’s essential that your site appears on the first page of search results. A few years ago people where happy to scroll through a few pages of results to find the site they’re looking for, but no longer. People are much more web savvy nowadays and so, if they don’t see what they’re looking for on the first page, they quickly modify their search terms and search again.

So, how do we ensure we get on that first page? Well basically there are only two key areas to SEO – ‘On page optimisation’ and ‘Link building’. In this article I’ll focus on the first of these two areas and I’ll tackle Link building another time.

On-page optimisation

This is all about making it easy for Google to work out what your page is about. The key thing to remember here is that Google does not see your webpage as you do. Google sees the code behind the page. If you right click somewhere on your webpage with your mouse a menu will pop up and one of the options should be ‘view page source’. If you click that you’ll see the webpage as Google does – looks complicated right? Well that’s why we need to help Google out a little here.

We do that by focusing on a few key areas – Page Title, Headings, Alt tags and the Page content itself.

Optimising the Page Title

If you look at your webpage in your browser the ‘Title’ is the bit right at the top. It’s not actually visible on the web page itself, but right at the top of the browser window.

This is probably the most important element to get right as this is what Google ‘scores’ the most highly. So, if you run a shop called ‘Luxury Foods of London’ and you specialise in caviar, for example, what should the title of your webpage be? “Welcome to Luxury Foods of London”? Er, no. Remember what you’re trying to do – you want to sell to people searching for your product, or at least get them to visit your site. These potential customers are not typing ‘luxury foods London’ into Google (well they might) but more likely they’ll type in ‘caviar shop london’ or words to that effect. So when they hit search in Google, Google is looking for websites that score highly for those key words. So you want to tell Google that that’s what your site is all about.

You do that by having a page title along the lines of ‘Caviar shop – Luxury Foods of London”. Now compared to the first attempt at a title where only one of the words in matched the search term (“London”), you now have all three! Kerching! Three’s better than one and so Google will move you higher up the list of results.

This is good not only for helping Google, but also your customers… Imagine a customer, we’ll call him Rufus. Rufus is sat at home in London, desperate for some caviar (we’ve all been there). He turns to Google to help him on his quest, types in “caviar shops in London” and hits ‘Search’. Google has a little look around and then presents him with a long list of potential vendors. He sees the link to your shop with the words “Luxury Foods London” and he knows that there’s a good chance that you’ll stock what he’s craving, but he can’t be sure from the page title alone. He’s about to give it a click and see, when, wait, what’s that he spotted above the link to your site? “Caviar Specialists London”…he’s just seen a link to your competitor’s site and can tell immediately that his search is over. Click. You’ve just lost a sale.

Hopefully now you’re beginning to understand what we mean by keywords – they’re words that your potential customers are typing into Google when searching for your product. One of the hardest things to do in SEO is working out what terms your customers are searching for – it’s not always what you first think.

It’s also important to target specific and relevant keywords. If you’re a travel agent, there’s little point in spending hours optimising your web pages for the word ‘Holiday’. If someone’s searching for ‘holiday’ the chances are they’re just dreaming of a break oneday, or perhaps searching for Billie Holiday records – why waste youre time trying to attract them to your site? However, if someone’s searching for ‘holidays to cyprus’, the fact that the term’s a little more specific means that they’re a little bit more serious about actually booking a holiday. Now take this one step further. What about someone searching for “Cyprus holidays summer 2010”? This person knows that they want a holiday, they know where they want to go and they know when – they’re what you might call a well qualified lead and exactly the type of person you want to attract.

So the lesson here? Be specific with your keyword targeting. In this instance, to attract this well qualified customer, you ought to build a webpage on your site that’s specifically all about Holidays in Cyprus. Your page title might look something like “Cyprus Holidays – Spring, Summer, 2010 and 2011”. This page title hits all the keywords so will score highly on Google, but also isn’t so specific that you miss out on another well qualified customer searching for “holidays in Cyprus spring 2011”.

So, we understand that we need to match our page title to the keywords to score highly in Google and out rank our competitors. But the page title is not the only weapon in our arsenal – we can score even more points by targeting other areas of the page that Google looks upon favourably.

Next target – Headings

At the beginning of most if not all of your web pages you will have a Heading. Often you will see on the home page of a site something along the lines of ‘Welcome to Travelmania’. This is dumb. It’s dumb for two reasons – firstly no-one landing on this page cares if they’re ‘Welcome’ or not - they just wantto know if you sell holidays to Cyprus. So tell them immediately – otherwise they’ll just hit the back button and try another site. Secondly no-one is going to search for ‘welcome to travelmania’. They’re searching for the product they want to buy- ‘Cyprus holidays’! To score extra points in Google and to get your site further up the list of search results you need to get these keywords in your page heading too. So instead of ‘Welcome to Travelmania’, have ‘ Travelmania – Specialists in holidays to Cyprus’. Bang, bang - two more points, and you’re a little further up the list.

It’s probably worth pointing out at this point that the Google algorithm used for sorting search results into relevance is not a simple as “bang there’s a keyword, give em a point”. It’s incredibly complex and in reality few people other than the Google search boffins know exactly how Google scores page relevancy. But, have no doubt; the key elements we’re talking about in this article are a big part of that algorithm.

The next area to be searching for ways to score points is in your image Alt tags. What’s one of those you might ask. Well it’s a short description you assign to each of the images on your web page; designed to help those with visual disabilities. Some visually impaired people have access to specialist software that will actually ‘read’ the contents of a web page to them. If the screen reader comes across an image it will look for the ‘Alt’ tag for a description of that image so it can describe to the user what the image actually is. So, it’s good practice to include these descriptions every time you add an image to your webpage if only to improve usability. But there’s no reason why you can’t use these tags in your favour too to score more points with Google.

If we go back to our hypothetical travelmania site (I’ve just realised that that site probably does exist, and it does! Sorry guys at Travelmania - just a coincidence), and imagine our Cyprus holidays page, well on that page we’ll probably have a nice image of a beautiful Cypriot coastline. Many people would lazily add the description ‘coastline’ to that image – well it’s a missed opportunity. Now that we understand this SEO stuff, we’d be smart and change that description to “See beautiful coastlines on your Cyprus holiday”. Bang, bang. Getting the picture?

So, we’ve optimised the page title, the page heading, and the alt tags. What’s left? The page content itself.

The Page Content

It’s important not to go overboard here. Remember your site still has to be readable by real people, not just Google, so we need to include our keywords but not to such an extent that we come across plain weird. There’s no point spending all that time in effort getting to the top of Google’s search results just for someone to click through to your page and be faced with paragraphs so riddled with keywords that the sentences become unreadable and the customer hits the dreaded ‘back’ button.

Make sure you include your keywords 2 or 3 times in the first couple of paragraphs, but that’s it. If you read the text and it reads like it’s been optimised, you’ve gone too far.

It is important though to ensure you get the keywords near the beginning of the page. Again, Google’s looking for relevancy, and gives a greater weighting to words that appear in the first paragraph than those in the last. It just common sense – if you manage to get all the way to the bottom of the page before coming across the word ‘Cyprus’, it’s unlikely that Cyprus is that relevant to the page’s subject matter.

So that’s it, really. By tailoring these four keys areas to match your targeted keywords, you’re on your way to the top of Google’s search results. Next time we’ll look at the other part of SEO – link building.