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If it was easy, everybody would be doing it.
Getting a company’s name and products, or
services, onto the first page of a genuine Google
search isn’t a trivial piece of work. In
fact, there are four distinct skills that a search
engine optimiser needs to possess. Most people
possess one or maybe two of these skills, very
rarely do people posses all four. In truth, to
get to all four, people who are good at two of
these need to actively develop the other skills.
Now, if you are running your own business, do
you really have the time to do this? Is this the
best use of your time?
Specifically the four skills needed for SEO work
are:
Web Design – producing a visually attractive
page
HTML coding - developing Search Engine friendly
coding that sits behind the web design
Copy writing – producing the actual readable
text on the page
Marketing – what are the actual searches
that are being used, what key words actually get
more business for your company?
Many website designers produce more and more
eye-catching designs with animations and clever
rollover buttons hoping to entice the people onto
their sites. This is the first big mistake; using
designs like these will actually decrease your
chances of a high Google rating. Yes, that’s
right; all that money you have paid for the website
design could be wasted because no-one will ever
find your site.
The reason for this is that before you get people
to your site you need to get the spiderbots to
like your site. Spiderbots are pieces of software
used by the search engine companies to trawl the
Internet looking at all the websites, and then
having reviewed the sites, they use complex algorithms
to rank the sites. Some of the complex techniques
used by web designers cannot be trawled by spiderbots.
They come to your site, look at the HTML code
and exit stage right, without even bothering to
rank your site. So, you will not be found on any
meaningful search.
I am amazed how many times I look at websites
and I immediately know they are a waste of money.
The trouble is that both the web designers and
the company that paid the money really do not
want to know this. In fact, I have stopped playing
the messenger of bad news (too many shootings!);
I now work round the problem. So, optimising a
website to be Google friendly is often a compromise
between a visually attractive site and an easy
to find site.
The second skill is that of optimising the actual
HTML code to be spiderbot friendly. I put this
as different to the web design because you really
do need to be “down and dirty” in the
code rather than using an editor like FrontPage,
which is OK for website design. This skill takes
lots of time and experience to develop, and just
when you think you have cracked it, the search
engine companies change the algorithms used to
calculate how high your site will appear in the
search results.
This is no place for even the most enthusiastic
amateur. Results need to be constantly monitored,
pieces of code added or removed, and a check kept
on what the competition are doing. Many people
who design their own website feel they will get
searched because it looks good, and totally miss
out this step. Without a strong technical understanding
of how spiderbots work, you will always struggle
to get your company on the first results page
in Google.
Thirdly, I suggested that copy writing is a skill
in its own right. This is the writing of the actual
text that people coming to your site will read.
The Googlebot and other spiderbots like Inktomi,
love text – but only when written well in
proper English. Some people try to stuff their
site with keywords, while others put white writing
on white space (so spiderbots can see it but humans
cannot).
Spiderbots are very sophisticated and not only
will not fall for these tricks, they may actively
penalise your site – in Google terms, this
is sandboxing. Google takes new sites and “naughty”
sites and effectively sin-bins them for 3-6 months,
you can still be found but not until results page
14 – really useful! As well as good English,
the spiderbots are also reading the HTML code,
so the copy writer also needs an appreciation
of the interplay between the two. My recommendation
for anyone copy writing their own site is to write
normal, well-constructed English sentences that
can be read by machine and human alike.
The final skill is marketing, after all this
is what we are doing – marketing you site
and hence company and products/services on the
Web. The key here is to set the site up to be
accessible to the searches that will provide most
business to you. I have seen many sites that can
be found as you key in the company name. Others
that can be found by keying in “Accountant
Manchester North-West England”, which is
great, except no-one ever actually does that search.
So the marketing skill requires knowledge of a
company’s business, what they are really
trying to sell and an understanding of what actual
searches may provide dividends.
I hope you will see that professional Search
Engine Optimisation companies need more than a
bit of web design to improve your business. Make
sure anyone you choose for SEO work can cover
all the bases.
About the author:
John Fowler trained as a Mathematican and has
worked in the IT industry for over 30 years, much
of the time in sales related functions. He now
spends his time between being a partner in SEO
Gurus and as a sales and management trainer for
ICT companies. John can be contacted via http://www.seogurus.co.uk
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