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
