Enterprise Nation

Search engine optimisation is the ability to use search engines to get free traffic to your website, by making yourself more visible on the web. It can be used to dramatically increase awareness of your brand. Henri Asseily of Telnic shows how it's done.

Tips for top results

If your site - or an editorial piece, blog recommendation or social recommendation - is listed on the first page of a Google or Bing search then people will see the name, even if they do not click the link. In this sense SEO is ideal for competitive positioning as your site will appear alongside other businesses of the same theme when users search for keywords. The higher you are ranked above these competitors, the more traffic will be directed to your site as people will perceive you as valuable.

There are a few things to remember when you decide to "optimise", i.e. make more visible your web page.

Goal 1

Goal 1 is to make engines find your pages. For this you simply have to make sure your site is indexed, which means submitting your URL to the search engine. Make sure you submit your site manually - don't wait for them to discover you as this can take up to nine weeks or in the worst case, they may not even get around to it. Search for 'submit a site' in the major search engines, and it will provide you with the link to apply.

Goal 2

Goal 2 is to ensure the search engine determines your site as the "best" result for a search. To achieve this goal you must consider the following areas of your web page:

• Content: Ask yourself, what is it that I am publishing and how is it useful to internet users? The more clear-cut and targeted the content, the more optimised your site will be.
• Backlinks: Think about the incoming links from other relevant pages, known as backlinks. If you have backlinks, you are effectively being endorsed by other webpages. You could do this by establishing reciprocal backlink agreements with websites in your subject area. Don't forget to use all of the free social networking tools at your disposal to give you additional authority; use Facebook, Google Maps and Profiles, Twitter and blogs to provide cross-links which will give you even more additional authority.
• Authority: Google will recognise an authoritative site and put it first in the rankings. To make yourself the authoritative page you need to be the obvious answer for a given search term. For example, if you google the term "news" then BBC is the returned result because it is seen as the most obvious place to find news. Consider how your web page is useful to users and match your key words closely to it. Put these keywords in the body of your site but also think about the header metatag (the description the search engine sees when indexing your site).
• Domain name: The URL text is all important, but the greatest secret is that the domain string is the most significant part. For example in <http://cadbury.co.uk/> http://cadbury.co.uk, "Cadbury" is the most important part of the URL because it takes you straight to the official site. If you can't get your prefered domain name with a .com or .co.uk, then buy and leverage your own .tel domain. .Tel is a digital business card, giving instant online presence and putting your contact details online. For SEO, .tel is superfast, it can be your authoritative domain and it leverages the search engine's love of domain streams.
• Age: It takes time for a website to creep its way up the search engine rankings, so be patient. Search engines will generally put your page in a purgatory sandbox for the first three to six months to avoid spamming and any attempt by professional "optimisers" to manipulate Google's page ranking. The older your page, the more trusted it will be by search engines.
• Page load time: Google will put you further up the rankings if your page loads faster - it's as simple as that. 5 seconds is too long, 1 second is good, 0.2 seconds is exceptional. Try to achieve faster load time by reducing the clutter and complexity of the design on your page. Be careful of using Flash and Rich Media content, as it makes it difficult for search engines to read your information. Don't ever duplicate content - you can't spam the index by putting two domains with the same content and get two results on the search engines. Search engines are on the look out for people who try and exploit the system and cheat algorithms.
• Community activity: Add external points of presence to your site such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, which you can update regularly. Try to be active in forums, where you can present yourself as an expert in your field and provide valuable information. Also, be aware that traffic coming from online communities is much more valuable than search engine traffic, as it improves the value of your information in the search engines themselves.

A final tip

The most important thing to remember when practising SEO is never to try and cheat the system - keep it simple and systematic. Stick to the rule book, use the above SEO tactics, and wait for your page to make its way up the rankings. If you get more traffic and ultimately business on the back of this, then you know SEO has worked for you.

Henri Asseily, Telnic