Understanding Search Engines

As you probably already know, Google is rated by many as the number one search engine in the world. Websites get about 90% of their search engine traffic direct from Google searches.

The following is hopefully an informative primer on the basics of search engine optimization techniques.

Get the Keywords Right

Choosing the right keywords to base your site optimization around is an important first step. General or generic keywords are usually not the best approach, and it's better to be a little more specific and focus on niche keywords relating to your product or service.

For instance, if you target a generic word like “promotions” there are over 92 million competing sites and if you carry out the search yourself on Google you will see that the results produce a wide selection of interpretations of the word “promotions”. Research has also shown that the average search phrase uses 3-5 related words.

To get a good ranking for this word would not only be financially prohibitive, it would probably not result in you converting those listings to customers.

We need to be more specific, which means:
1. Targeting a more suitable market that is looking for the specific services you are offering
2. Competing with fewer websites targeting the same keywords
3. Optimizing for keywords that people actually use when performing searches
Targeting a suitable market will depend on your website, as well as the products and services you offer.

To find out how many websites are competing with your keywords -- either intentionally or not -- simply do a search on Google and note down how many results are returned. The more sites that are competing for your keywords, the harder it will be to get on the front page.

As a rough guideline, we try to optimize every page on your site for a different search phrase. Each search phrase should contain 2 to 3 highly targeted keywords.

Your Domain and Title Tag

Two of the most determining factors in Google's ranking are your domain name and title tag.

Your age of your domain will be of significance.  Newer domains are harder to achieve good rankings for.

Drupal also gives the ability to add your keywords into the names of your pages.

Your title tag is equally as important as your domain name. Using keywords in your title tag can improve your Google ranking significantly. Trying to achieve a balance of professionalism with keyword density in the title tag however is sometimes a little more difficult.

You will probably have to live with some compromise with the title for the page to help with the rankings.

Usually, the closer to the front of your title tag the keywords are placed, the better.
 

Unique Relevant Content (URC):
One way Google can separate and rank one website above another is how much unique relevant content it has on its pages. Google cannot read images so whilst a flashy image rich website might look nice this will not help the website rank high in the Google search Engine. By adding a body of text that is not only relevant to the business sector but also written uniquely for a particular website/company with the targeted key terms throughout gives Google more substance to rank you above your competitors.

H1 Tags and Keyword Density

<h1> tags seem to have been depreciated by stylesheets these days, and are not used as often as they used to be.

The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you're using a <h1> tag, then the text in between this tag must be more important than the content on the rest of the page.

Here's a quick example:
<h1>Google sees this text as more important</h1>
<p>... than this text</p>

By default, H1 tags aren't the prettiest in terms of formatting, so using a CSS style to override the default look is usually a good idea:
H1 { color: blue; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px }

Sprinkling keywords throughout your page content can also improve your sites keyword density. Keyword density simply means the ratio of optimized keywords to the rest of the content on your page. It is usually expressed as a percentage, and should be between 7% and 10% for each page on your site.

Links, Links and More Links

And this leads us to the toughest part of the Google SEO process -- back-links. Back links are websites that link directly to your website. The general principal is the more back links you have, the higher your pages will be ranked, as your website must be good if so many other sites are linking back to it.

“Back Links” or “Inbound Links” as they are sometimes called are over 80% of Google’s ranking criteria. Basically when the Google software known as “spiders” crawl through a website to pick up and establish its content they follow any link to another website to see if it is a quality website. One could say that a “Back Link” is a vote from someone else’s website to your website and of course the more votes you have the better Google thinks other people like your website so it will move you up the pages of its search engine.

Now couple that with making sure all of the “Votes/Links” comes from high quality websites that belong to real live trading companies and ensuring the Link itself comes from a page that has plenty of unique relevant content and again Google will consider this link to be very important and ultimately move the website up as it considers the website to be an authority its is particular business sector.