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It’s rare these days to come across clients who haven’t heard about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), however there are many misconceptions about how this works, or what should be expected from an SEO supplier. SEO can be very complex, so I’ve put this post together to help people understand the basics of SEO, so that readers will be able to have a more meaningful conversation about SEO if they wish to find a provider.

The first thing to understand is all the acronyms and jargon, hopefully this concise guide will get you on the track to a better understand.

The second most important thing to know about SEO, is how things relate to each other. I will continue that discussion in my next posts, which will include: -

Desired Search Phrases Vs Researched Search Phrases
Ranking Positions Vs Traffic

First of all, you need to understand these points: -

1) Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimising your website so that search engines will produce your website as a result for a given search made on that search engine. While SEO specifically refers to optimising your website, you may be surprised to know that 70%-80% of the work carried out by an SEO company actually occurs offsite, i.e. work carried out to improve your rankings in search engines that does not involve actually editing your website.

In Ireland, Google is used as the primary search engine by approximately 95% of people, and while there are other search engines available, including Yahoo, AltaVista and Ask.com, realistically Google is the only one that counts. Everybody who uses the internet carries out searches in Google to find things they want, so when a search is carried out for a product or service you provide, then you want to be at the top, this way you have the best chance of the person coming to your website, and hence the best chance of winning that business. Getting you there is SEO!

2) Google

It’s important to understand a little about Google so that you can understand the process of SEO. Google’s job is to provide the person carrying out a search with the best possible results for the search phrase they have entered, and nothing more.

So first of all it needs to know about your website, if you type you website name into Google and it returns even one result, then it knows you exist, if no results are returned then it doesn’t know you exist. This is known as being indexed. If you don’t exist, i.e. if your site is not indexed, then the first thing an SEO company needs to do is to get you indexed. This is common for newly registered domain names, however most existing websites will already be in Google.

The second thing Google needs to do is determine what results you will appear in. It does this by reading your website and determining what your website is all about, it then determines how important your website is and then determines what search results you will appear in and what position you will appear in.

You can add your site to Google using this form, but there are no guarantee’s they will add you. In fact with Google there are no guarantees of anything, this is the same no matter who is doing your SEO for you. All Google cares about is returning the most suitable results, it does not care where you are ranked, or whether you think your site should appear above others because you think it’s a better result, it determines this for itself and you cannot tell it otherwise. What however you can do, is try to learn how Google ranks your site, and then adjust your site to meet all of Google criteria, hence making it the best result and appear first. That is SEO, however it’s important to know that Google does not tell anyone how it rates websites, and so good SEO companies will have learned these things over time, and it’s that knowledge that allows SEO companies to be good at what they do.

3) Guarantees

Google cannot be influenced by anyone, there are no associate programs, or Google authenticated SEO companies or any subscriptions to Google allowing one SEO company to have an advantage over another. Everyone is playing on a level playing field. Anyone who tells you different is not telling the truth!

4) KeywordsSearch Phrases

Keywords or Search Phrases are simply the word or words you enter into a search engine when searching for something. Most clients I meet think they know what search phrases they should be showing up for, however these are not always the search phrases people are using. A good SEO company will research the most suitable keywords and search phrases for your website and determine a list that they will pursue to get you highly ranked for each and every search phrase. Primary Position works on 10 keywords per month per website, so if you hire us to do SEO for a 6 month or 12 month programme, we will rank your site for 60 – 120 keywordssearch phrases.

5) Search Engine RankingsPositions

Search Engine Rankings or Positions, are simply where you appear in the list of results output by a search engine after completing a search. Google returns multiple pages, each will 10 listings per page. So the most important page is naturally page 1, where you can achieve positions 1 through 10.

6) Traffic

Traffic refers to the number of visitors your website received. It will often be displayed as Hits or Unique Visitors. A Hit refers to a server request; and there will be multiple hits for each page loaded. So if your homepage has for example 50 items on it, made up of content areas and images, then each time your homepage is visited, it logs 50 hits. Needless to say this is a useless statistic, as someone who completely goes through your website could equate to 1,000 hits. Therefore the most important statistic is either visitors, or better again unique visitors. Unique visitors is the most important statistic, as visitors includes each and every visit a user logs, whereas unique visitors would just count as one visit even if that person came to your site 10 times that day.

7) Indexing

Once your site has been indexed, as discussed in Point 2 above, Google will keep coming back to your website to read it again so it is constantly up to date. The problem with this is, that depending on how important Google ranks your website, will determine how often it revisits (re-indexes) your websites to pickup changes. This can vary from every hour to several months at a time. The merits of an SEO campaign can therefore only be seen after each indexing, so if you’ve had no SEO carried out on your website, and Google is only visiting once every two months, then it will take months to improve the position of your site. We generally quote 3-6 months before there will be a significant improvement in positions for a new project.

Page Rank

A Page Rank is a simple 0-10 ranking of the importance of your website by Google. The higher the rank the more often Google will re-index your site as well as improving is search positions. Low ranking sites can also appear number 1 for particular searches, so it’s important not to place too much emphasis on this number as it is a rough guide only generally. A page rank of 5 or 6 would be considered a good page rank, and 4 would be considered adequate.

9) Links

Links are important to Google in order to determine the importance of your website. If there are a million websites that link to your website, then obviously your site would be considered to have significantly more importance that a site with only 10 links to it. For this reason it is very important to build a significant number of inbound links, i.e. links pointing in to your website. Outbound links are links on your website pointing to other websites.

The quality of these inbound links is also important; ideally they will be links from websites with good ranking positions and page ranks themselves. Many links can be harmful also, so you have to be careful not to just add links to your sites indiscriminately.

10) Organic Rankings Positions

When you complete a search in Google, there are three distinct search result areas. Two of these are sponsored link areas and will have a different colour background. Organic positions refer to the area with the white background, where the results haven’t appeared solely because they’ve paid Google to appear there, but rather are considered by Google to be the best result for that particular search.

11) Paid Inclusion or Paid Advertising

The paid links referred to in Point 10 above are considered to be either Paid Inclusion links or Paid Advertising. To appear in these positions, you pay each and every time that actual link is clicked, this can range from 10c to €50 per click and is known as Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) through Google AdWords. PPC Advertising can also be a very effective way of driving traffic to your website, but will have a continued cost for each and every click forever, whereas SEO can get you to the top where you can be clicked millions of times with no extra cost. If is often beneficial to run both an SEO and a PPC campaign simultaneously. Primary Position would recommend Web AD as an excellent PPC provider.

12) Keyword Efficiency Index (KEI)

KEI, or Keyword Efficiency Index is important when choosing keywords you want to focus on. KEI is calculated on the estimated search result number. Measuring and comparing the demand for your keyword (Daily World Searches) against the number of Web pages that include it (Competition) is a helpful approach to pick up the best keywords. The resulting ratio, KEI or ‘Keyword Effectiveness Index’ will give an idea of how important a specific keyword is.

KEI = (DS^2/C) = (DS/C * DS)

where DS is the number of daily world searches and C is the competition. The KEI range goes from 0 to over 400.

    * 0-10 = Poor keyword
    * 10-100 = Good Keyword
    * 100-400+ = Excellent Keyword

Keywords with the highest KEI combine popularity and less competition.