Undersatnding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO or Search engine optimisation is a difficult thing to come to grips with because of the diverse opinions within the industry and many saying SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is DEAD.

Confusion starts when one looks for a definition of SEO (search Engine Optimisation) and does not get a clear concise definition.  I like to define SEO (search Engine Optimisation) to my customer base as follows:

SEO or Search engine optimisation is the collective online effort of your entire marketing team to ensure  that your pages are indexed in search engines in a manner that ensures that you get qualified visitors who are looking for your products, services or related information.

Most companies leave the SEO (search Engine Optimisation) of their pages up to the web design team and do not integrate SEO into their entire marketing policy, leaving no SEO (search Engine Optimisation)  policy specific directives for any other online work. This is purely because the management have not been correctly informed of what SEO (search Engine Optimisation) is and why they need to have a dedicated person in charge of their SEO (search Engine Optimisation) . Once you understand the definition above you will realise that SEO (search engine optimisation) is a complicated affair that requires team work with a clear set of policy directives that need to be enforced across a wide spectrum of disciplines within your advertising and marketing efforts. 

Defining the "ABOUTNESS"  of your pages and ensuring that this aboutness is translated into your page construction and the subsequent social media marketing  and related promotion of your web site is the key to ensuring that search engines send your site well qualified visitors which can be converted to customers.

To achieve this you will need to have some policy directives that need to be in place and followed by your entire marketing team. You will need to understand your target market groups and cater for each target market group separately, ensuring a common thread, with some common key words and a base set of pages that form a core from which you will expand the different target market groups in a coherent and logical manner that search engines will be able to understand and relate to the aboutness of your entire site, with out losing focus of your intent.

Remember that search engines are changing fast along with the social media influences that you will need to manage in ways that ensure that your page's aboutness can be related to the searchers intent. Search engines are taking more and more variables into account as the amount of data online increases. It is becoming very difficult for search engines  to manage these large data volumes and still supply an end user with relevant up to date information. Search engines are taking strain and are showing signs of frustration due to the large amounts of spam and irrelevant data that is on-page in the form of advertising as well as links to pages that do not discuss similar or related information. Sites that link to other sites just for the sake of generating links as in link farms are also of grave concern to search engines, as they have very little importance or value to the page in question. 

These 2 articles explain a little more  and offer a different view on some issues.

1)  the end of link building as we know it 
2) impact of the next penguin update



 

Understanding search experince from an SEO viewpoint

The  experience of an end user of your information at a search engine is determined by many factors This article helps  us to put some of them into the picture more clearly.

What an end user is  expecting when he / she uses a search engine is often forgotten by the web master and those involved in designing a web page, as is clearly pointed out in the article. So what is your responsibility as an SEO specialist when you discuss the make up and contents of a web page?

Which words an end user will type into the search engine is difficult to determine, but what your end users perceive your website to be about  is very helpful, and your marketing team should fill you in on this as they are the ones who determine your target market, and give you a brief on the aims, objectives and purpose of a page.

The term "aboutness" is used in the article discussed and this is very often neglected by the design team. How to ensure that this is taken seriously by the marketing people in your design team is often a problem,  as they are concerned about the marketing issues and loose sight of the fact that  the rest of the team must be following their instructions, as all online materials which are not directly sales pages are about marketing different aspects of your company / organisation in some shape manner or form.

The aboutness of your pages is often a subject that is attributed to the web site as a whole and not a single page. This is an important aspect of the search experience as the words that the end user (Searcher) uses to find your information is defined by his ideas of the aboutness of your information. It thus follows that each page needs some attention of its own aboutness as a stand alone page.

As a seasoned internet user you know and take many things for granted which most end users are totally ignorant about. This often leads to the aboutness of a page being lost or misplaced and thus not included from an SEO point of view in the page makeup instructions in a manner that the copy writer clearly understands.  When your work force is small and there are less than 5 people working on your pages these things become more critical as there are less eyes to pick up these small errors that lead to the aboutness of your page being misinterpreted by search engines.

Now we all hear about KEY word META TAGS being irrelevant for SERP's (Search Engine Results Positions) and how they are a waste of time and effort, but what do they do for the ABOUTNESS of your page?  Did you ever think of the aboutness of your page from a key word meta tag perspective?

To ensure that the aboutness of you page is interpreted better by both search engines and end users ensure you page has the following.

1) a page description  (meta tags in head)
2) a page title (meta tags in head)
3) a key words list (meta tags in head)
4) good well worded content
5) out bound links to related material (internal)
6) inbound links (internal links) from other relevant pages within your web site 
7) out bound links to related material (external)
8) Inbound links from
                                 a) your social media platforms
                                 b)  external sources (other webs sites)
If you have all eight of these essential parts of your SEO in place the end user will find your site closer to the top of the SERP's and thus have a better search experience when searching for your info..

Search experience is determined by the search engine, and you (SEO / SEM staff)  play a small but very significant role by ensuring that your pages are search engine friendly. read this article for more on understanding search experience