Search Engine Optimisation

There are many ways of driving traffic to a website, but the most popular and arguably the most cost-effective is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

With the exception of the "sponsored links" alongside the main results, search engines do not let you buy your way onto their listings. To do so would spell disaster: search engines live and die by the relevance of their search results.

In order to rank well for a given search term, your website needs to demonstrate to the search engines that it contains content relevant to that term. How it does this is down to two major factors:

1. On-page factors.

The content of each page is read by a computer script and its textual content is automatically analysed and stored.

If a word appears, say, twice in the body text, the search engine will flag the page as being fairly relevant to that word, and the page will appear in the results when that word is searched for. If the word appears four times in the body text, once in the page title and once in a caption below an image, the search engine will conclude that the page is extremely relevant to that word, and the page will appear higher up the listings for that search. However, if the word appears on the page unnaturally often, the search engine may well conclude that something funny is going on and not list the page at all. An optimal "keyword density" must therefore be found.

Contrary to general opinion, metatags - textual tags hidden in the HTML behind a webpage - are becoming increasingly less important to SEO. For example, the "keywords" metatag, once the fulcrum of any SEO project, is now completely ignored by Google.

2. Off-page factors.

Web pages do not exist in isolation. In addition to the content that is on each individual page, Google (and the other search engines) takes into account the ways other pages on the internet relate to the page in question.

If for example you are selling websites in Hong Kong, you will probably be trying to optimise a page for the search term "web design hong kong" (which happens to be my personal favourite). You will have written a page (or several) explaining how your service is unique, and you will have used the words "web design hong kong" frequently througout the text. This, however, may not be enough to persuade Google that your page is more relevant to that search term than all the other pages relating to web design, here in Hong Kong (and there are quite a few).

Search engines also take into account those pages which contain links to your page. In short, the more links there are from relevant, external sites, the better. Each link contributes to a thing called the Google PageRank. The more links there are, the higher the PageRank; the higher the PageRank, the nearer you get to the number one spot.