Never fully answered and constantly asked questions about SEO

Posted on 26th Dec, 2009. Posted in: Optimisation, Search Engine

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

I have noticed a few questions that never seem to stop being asked or even fully answered, so I thought I would try to clear a few things up for anyone who has ever asked a question about SEO. So let´s start!

Question 1: What is SEO

I feel the person´s frustration when they are asking this question, so many individuals and business owners have purchased a Website thinking that it will simply run itself and generate business enquiries from day one of launch. Sorry to tell you this but you have either been really naive due to a lack of online knowledge or you have been mislead at some point.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, but what is a search engine? A search engine is a tool that millions of Internet users use to find Website´s they are looking for, a user will use these search engines by entering a keyword or key phrase, for example: If I was to enter ´gymnastic lessons in Doncaster´ a list of all the gymnastic groups across that area would appear in the search results (also knows as SERP´s) The biggest search engine is Google but there are hundreds of other search engines.

So how does a search engine work and how do I make sure they list my Website in the search results when someone is trying to find my services?

Good question. Each search engine has their own spider that they send to crawl the World Wide Web for information relevant to what they need on their search engine, if your Website has something that the search engine needs, they will find you a place on the search engine. The task of understanding what search engines are looking for and putting it in the right places on your Website such as your content, is the foundations of search engine optimisation.

Tip: Whatever keyword or key phrase you believe your audience is searching for your services by, you need to repeat this word in your site content, but be careful not to repeat it too often because this will be seen as spam by the search engines. Try to fit your targeted words and phrases in the opening paragraph of your Website, repeat it less in the middle of your content and then more towards the bottom.

never fully answered SEO questions

Question 2: Do I really need to be bothered about SEO?

Well I guess that is something that you need to decide for yourself, I can only point out how important SEO is if your Website is going to even stand a chance of success online, the rest is up to you. An un–optimised Website will always get stumbled upon every now and again, but with the use of SEO you can send hundreds of visitors to your Website who are already looking for what you have to offer.

With there being millions of people now searching online, being on the page one of a search engine such as Google can make all of the difference between success and failure.

Question 3: What are links?

There are two different kinds of links; there are internal links within your own Website and incoming links from other Website or blogs.

Search engines like Website that uses their content to link to other pages on the Website. For example: if you was on the home page of a Website that offered a dog walking service and you read the following sentence on their home page ´fully relax on your holiday this year by hiring our dog walking services´ You can see that I have embolden a keyword and a key phrase. ´hiring´ could link to another page on this Website called ´Why Hire Us´ and ´dog walking service´ could link to the sites ´Services´ page, these are internal links and you should try to create as many of these as possible. Not only do search engines love them, but it will also create a much easier to navigate Website for your users.

Incoming links are links which come from another Website to yours. A great place to gain incoming links is other related blogs to yours, you must make sure that the blog you are commenting on is relevant to your own Website or your incoming link will not count towards your seo efforts. You can place links on blogs by either becoming a guest author on a regular basis, commenting on blog posts, and if your own blog has enough to offer, then you may find your link in other blog resource lists.

You should also check the Page Rank of any blogs you are using to gain links from as the higher the Page Rank the better it will be for your Website. If you use Firefox as your web browser, you can install this Page Rank tool which will display the Page Rank of each Website you visit in the bottom right corner of your browser, making it even easier to make sure you are using blogs that will give you quality links, and produce a good amount of traffic back to your own Website.

never fully answered SEO questions

Question 4: I have been told not to produce duplicate content, but what is this?

Search engines do not like duplicate content and might even penalize you for producing duplicate content. Duplicate content can occur when you write an article and submit it to more than one ezine, or you copy and paste articles from ezines to use as your blog posts. There are tools online which you can use to run your content through which can automatically change your content by up to 60%, but the best way to avoid duplicate content is to only write something and use it once.

Question 5: What is on page optimisation and how do I do it?

On page optimisation is the optimisation of each individual web page of your Website and a good starting point is making sure you have all of your keywords in the right place. Search engines have been known to focus on the domain, title and content of your Website, but there has been recent argument over how important some of these factors actually are.

Domain

– before you purchase your domain name, try to include your main keyword within it.

Title

– your title tag is what will be displayed in the search engine SERP´s and act as a link to your Website from the search engine. You should include your keyword or key phrase in your title tag and change the title tag of each page on your Website to suit the content of each page. A title tag should be short and basically be a title suited for each page content, if you view the source code of your Website your Website, your title tag will look something like this –
<title>Never fully anwered and constantly asked questions about SEO</title>

Content

– The content of your Website is really important as this is what the search engine spider crawls and uses to decide where your Website should be indexed on the search engine. As already mentioned above, you should include your keyword as often as you can, focusing on the opening paragraph, less on the middle and more again towards the bottom of your Website.

You may hear webmasters talking of the importance of Meta tags but these are not really as important as they once were and wouldn´t gain you any points with the search engines. Saying that though, it doesn´t harm anything to also optimise your Meta tags as you never know if they will become important again in the future as the search engines change.

So there you have it, five of the fifteen questions about SEO I come across on the World Wide Web while browsing many different forums and blogs.

This post was written for SEO newbie´s, but I hope even some of the more experienced webmasters will benefit from it or even leave a kind word of advice for others looking to optimise their Website.

If you liked this post please share it.

About The Author

Michelle Kirkbride has many years of experience as a web developer & consultant. She currently lives in Yorkshire, UK with her two beautiful children and loving partner. She spends far too much time at her computer and is currently addicted to her work. The founder of Kaplang is also a business Mentor with D100, a Success Doncaster mentoring programme run by Deloitte and funded by the Doncaster Council.