Lameland

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can essentially be broken down into two categories of activity. These are “on page” (work done to the pages of the site) and “off page” (work done outside the pages of the site).

Everything begins with the user. Their thoughts and desires determine the search phrase that they enter into a search engine such as Google.

This single phrase or keyword (KW) is the only thing that the search engines have to return the results that users are looking for. Search engines like Google expend huge resources to try and ensure that the user search experience matches their expectations so that they will continue to use the same search engine again.

Search engines look at websites and use complex algorithms to determine an order of importance to display back to the user. This is called ranking.

The ranking of a website can be improved by working on various characteristics that are used by search engines in their algorithms.

It should also be noted that if a website is subject to frequent change or new additional content (especially if this becomes linked to other content on the web) then the frequency of search engine visits is also likely to increase and the rate at which the ranking of the website is reviewed will also increase.

On Page Factors

(i) Coding and content of page. Do the contents of the page relate to the KW? Is the page coded so that the KW phrase appears more important to search engines?

(ii) The age of the domain. The older the site, the better in Google’s eyes. Recent reported experiences suggest that while changing content and hosting is unlikely to affect your ranking, changing your domain registrar can negatively affect ranking.

(iii) The speed with which the page loads. From a Google standpoint, the faster a website displays, the better the user experience. Slow loading sites are penalised with lower rankings by Google.

Off Page Factors

Off page work is done to influence pages on sites outside the target page. The most important aspect of this is to get “links” back to the page that is being optimized. Key criteria to improve search engine ranking are:

(i) The number of links

(ii) Their importance (as indicated by Google page Rank)

(iii) Their relevance

Additionally if more sites have links to pages within the target site then these links register with the search engine bots creating greater importance for the site. In Google this is reflected by a score known as Google Page Rank. Google Page Rank applies to the page – not the domain of the site.