This article is targeted at small business owners and medium business marketing staff looking for a thorough introduction to Search Engine Optimisation. It explains many terms and concepts and no level of technical expertise is required.

 

In a perfect world SEO wouldn't be needed, search engines would be able to ascertain the quality and relevance of a site accurately and provide the user with the most rewarding result.

 

This was Google’s goal when they launched and they've done a good enough job that these days most search engine optimization is focused specifically around how Google ranks web pages. While the specifics of Google’s algorithm are both secret and often updated there are a few cornerstones that most SEO activities target.

 

There are two elements which Google derive from each web page that are the primary influence on search ranking. Those are PageRank and Keywords. PageRank, named after Google founder Larry Page, is a essentially a rating of how important a web page is likely to be for a user. PageRank is difficult to alter directly as it is calculated based on the probability of a user randomly clicking links on the Internet and arriving at your web site combined with how often your site is visited by Google toolbar users. As sites with higher PageRank are more likely to visited randomly the smaller (PageRank) sites that these large sites link to also increase in value. That is to say if a site with a high PageRank starts linking to a site with a lower ranking the destination site’s PageRank will increase. 

 

When optimising page content for search engines PageRank is something to be aware of but not to focus on. This is also Google’s stance and to this end they've made PageRank unavailable from their webmaster tools, it’s not available in the Chrome browser (developed by Google), and the PageRank on the Google toolbar for other browsers is intentionally kept both out of date and inaccurate. All of that said, as a rough value for your web site it’s worth being aware of, if only to understand why another site may be appearing higher or lower than your own in search listings.

 

 

 

Keywords are the single biggest influence on your search ranking. This is a good thing as it’s also something that you have the most control over. No matter where your keywords are it’s important to remember that search engines aren’t the only ones who'll be seeing the keywords. Meta-Keywords, or keywords placed in part of the web page not visible to your users, are virtually no longer considered by search engines when determining your search ranking. Only the keywords that actually form part of your page content are considered.

 

Perhaps the most important place for keywords is in the page title itself. Not only are words in the title highly weighted by search robots but the title is also what the user will see as the search result. Every page title on your web site should be unique and also a good description of what that page is about. For shopping web sites it’s often desirable to keep certain keywords across various pages. While doing this though you shouldn't let it stop you from giving those pages unique titles. 

 

The best page titles let the user know what your site is about and also capture as many terms as possible that a user looking for your site may be searching for. It’s not a mistake that Beyond Furniture are number one on Google Australia for the Modern Furniture search term. Take a look at the title of their homepage:

 

Beyond Furniture - Sydney Furniture Store - Modern Sofa & Contemporary Furniture

 

There’s a lot done right here. Furniture is mentioned multiple times, but it’s not excessive enough for the search engine to consider it keyword spam because of the context of the words around it, so it raises the ranking.  For a user the title is perfect, you get the store name, location, and primary product. 

 

While meta keywords are no longer taken into account the meta description field is as important as it ever was. This field controls the short description of the web page shown below the title in the search listings. Words here, as well as counting toward the keyword ranking. As it’s also essentially the advertisement of your site to someone searching the web it’s worth getting right.

 

The next best place for keywords is in the URL itself. URL stands for Universal Resource Locator and for web pages is synonymous with the term web address. The URL is the address of your content on the Internet. The URL is also the final piece of information for your web site that the user will see in the search listings.

 

While having your domain, the bit before the .com, contain keywords regarding your products is ideal it’s not always an option, particularly for established businesses. You can however change the part of the URL after the domain. XSQUIZZIT customers on the TOTECS platform are able to customise their product and category page URLs from within the Administration centre.

 

If you're editing the HTML of your web site you should place your most important keywords in header tags (<h1>, <h2>, etc) keeping in mind that the h1 tag is ranked higher than any other body text of a web page. That said be sure not to overuse the h1 tag as excessive tags will be penalised by most search engines. If in doubt don't put anything in a header tag that isn't actually a heading! Remember that the best SEO targets human users as much as search engines.

 

Blog articles are generally keyword gold mines. An opportunity to pontificate on your products lets you hit every keyword you can think of in an article. Wrapping it up with a link to a category page or homepage, assuming your blog is already following all of the previous tips, is actually one of the few ways you can work to boost the page rank of your main site (assuming your blog is on a separate domain and has attracted a decent page rank from all of your excellently written blog articles). Further to that a well structured blog will attract users searching on keywords perhaps more tangential to your main site, and with back links to your site you can funnel these users from your blog to your web store.

 

The principle is similar with Twitter and Tumblr. Social Media sites tend to have high page ranks due to the size of their user base. Thanks to the nature of Social Media well written tweets, Facebook posts, Tumblr updates, etc. can all be phrased to hit your keywords and funnel people to your site while being published on a site likely to have a much higher page rank than your own. 

 

For more information on Search Engine Optimisation or general eCommerce strategy contact marketing@xsqit.com