Semantic Space

Keywords and phrases are entirely dependent on business objectives and need to be researched thoroughly to determine which words and phrases best represent the crossover of what you as an organisation which to offer (the reasons for your online marketing) and what terms your ideal audience for these services or products are using to search on. If your message is well-defined, then your keywords and phrases will bring you visitors that are most likely to follow your call to action be it a sales, a download, a vote or whatever – the primary objective of Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Preparation

As well as defining your semantic space it’s important that the site is prepared for the search engines on a technical level. A thorough site analysis will reveal unfriendly URLs, obstacles to search engine spiders and inappropriate Search Engine Optimization damaging code. Small coding differences can make a big difference – with a fast loading, well coded site with an accessible structure and high ratio of content to code proving irresistible to the search engines.

Copy

They say “content is king”. In the case of Search Engine Optimisation there are many who would agree. Search engines don’t look for images, video, audio or Flash – they search for text content. Good copy can go a long way. Whilst it is possible to achieve top rankings for specific keywords almost immediately based on “relevance”, some Search Engine Optimization ‘specialists’ try to be too relevant. They go keyword crazy when writing copy, a clumsy, short-term approach that reads terribly, dissuades visitors and damages credibility. Strong copy that interests and engages its audience (still including keywords and phrases of course) is without doubt the most effective approach in the long term. Quality counts as visitors will recommend the site, link to it increase its popularity by word of mouth – especially if the copy is kept fresh and updated regularly.

Structure

In addition to content, search engines respect structure and they like to know what’s important about your organization. Sites ideally should have the most semantically relevant information higher up in the site hierarchy and each page should use structural elements – heading, paragraph and other HTML tags – to prioritise importance.

Link Popularity

Link Analysis is another critical aspect of search engine’s ranking, in fact a large part of website optimisation happens off the page with Google and the other search engines determining sites importance by the links from external sites. Global Link Popularity is arguably the most important Search Engine Optimization criteria. Google, Yahoo, Msn and the other major search engines love to see sites that have quality incoming links from other relevant sites. Sources might include current associates, online directories, press releases and blogs.