Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Electos has always been a system that makes keeping a web site up to date, relevant, and continually changing easy to achieve. With v3.1 it now includes all the SEO meta data that you need to do the complete, page by page job. Read on to find out what you need to do to make your web pages "interesting" to the search engines.

How can we attract more visitors
As we have a group of websites of our own, and manage some for clients, we have access to a number of web site visitor statistics and we have seen some interesting hints.   
 
Keep Content changing

Firstly, the sites that we know to be active, where the content is changed or added to frequently, have seen site visits increase, in some cases fourfold in a 12 month period. 

 
Market your website!

Secondly, certainly in our own case, and we suspect in a couple of others, we can see a clear correlation between visits and other marketing activities such as our e-Newsletters. So your web site and your other marketing activities need to work together. On your web site you need content that will make your audience want to read what you have to say, and other activities that will send people to your web site to read it.
 
You must have Interesting Content
So Thirdly - and again, Content

Why would anyone want to visit your web site? Does it tell them something useful? Does it have something - information or products - that they can’t get elsewhere, or, for a Web Shop, which they might want to buy from you as opposed to somewhere else? And, in that case, why come to you, and not some other similar vendor?
 
And above all - does it change, so that people will want to bookmark the site, come back later to see what you are up to?.
 
Search Engine Lists
Getting to the top of a search engine list is on the whole, hard to achieve, though if you are in a niche market, it’s perhaps not too difficult. Try "Visual DataFlex" and you will find our Visual Dataflex site quite easily. Try "under cupboard radio" and you will find ElectronicZone right up the top, which is a very good result considering the search returned 157,000 items, so well done ElectronicZone. Try "web development" and just how do you get to the top of 174,000,000 items?!
 
Pay for it
Google has made its fortune by developing a means of selling positions. If you subscribe to Google AdWords then when someone types those words into Google your listing should come up on the "Sponsored Links" on the right hand side of the front page. This is done via an automated auction system - the more popular a search phrase is, the more you will pay to get a share of the searches using that search phrase put into that Sponsored Links listing .

The benefits of the system are that you get charged on a per click basis, assuming that users who click through are generally looking for your business services, and you can set a limit on what you spend per day.

Fine if you have something that clearly generates immediate revenue, a harder call otherwise. And you still have to make the resulting page worth looking at!
 
However, there is some evidence that the Sponsored Links list is ignored by many people. 
 
Interesting Content
Other than paying for it, we come back to interesting content. Content that search engines can read and rate. Words. And notably, not images. Search engines can’t read images.
 
Also, relevant content that changes frequently. By updating, editing and adding to your site content regularly Google associates the activity with something interesting

External links
While Google et al do make money out of paid for rating enhancement, the no-cost rating is about relevance, and, another important point, about how many other relevant sites have a link to your site. The latter is something you can go out and ask for, or, again, you can make your pages so interesting that other site authors will put a link from their site to your interesting material.
 
Consistency - be kind to Search Engines
Relevance is about consistency, and here is where you can do a lot to improve things - assuming you have something interesting to say of course, and are saying it in an interesting - especially to search engines - way. Web site rating robots use the visible text, together with some invisible text to check for consistency. The invisible text is primarily the page Title, and, with varying degrees of certainty as to particular searches engines usage, the page description and keywords meta data tags. The page Title is what appears in the very top left border of the web browser. The description and keywords you can see if you "View Source" from your web browser, and will look something like this
 
<meta name="description"   content="Asckey Data Services Ltd is blah blah blah" />
<meta name="keywords"      content="Asckey Data Services Ltd, Asckey, web systems, and so on"/>
 
Title, Description, Keywords should all echo the key page subject matter that the visitor sees. And if this looks a bit tecnical, Electos makes it easy, both for actually entering the words, and with a scheme that makes sure that if you haven’t entered something for a particular page yet, then a "reasonable" set of default entries will be used.

 
Relevant content - One size does not fit all
Like many businesses, we don’t just do one thing. We do Software Development and Facilities Management. (Well, actually a lot more than just that, but lets keep it simple)
 
So, our web pages will likely mention one subject or the other. And if we just have one set of Meta Data, probably built for the Home page, then the web site rating robots - "web crawlers" will decide they are not seeing what they have been lead to believe they should be seeing, and so will not rate the pages highly for either subject. This means that you must have the facilities to create this information on a page by page basis. And that you really must make the effort to make this information match the specific page content.  
 
This is what we have been doing for the last several months, and we think this is what has pushed our visitor scores up.
 
Other Points
 
Check that your internal links work: The web crawlers follow the same links on your site that a user would. So if a link on your menu bar doesn’t work or an internal text link is down, then the search engine will hit the same dead end that a user would. In Google’s view, not having the link at all is better than having one that leads to an error page. With Electos, it is quite hard to break links within the site, as Electos tracks and changes them as you move pages, images, downloadable files etc around, or even re-name them.
 
Generate external links back to your site: But make sure they’re relevant. By analyzing how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be "important" and thus deserving of a ranking boost. But don’t try to be clever - sophisticated techniques are used to screen out attempts by webmasters to build "artificial" links designed to boost their rankings.
 
SEO - Summary
Search engine optimization starts with interesting content, needs ongoing changing content, and needs good search engine meta data tailored to each page - and to each page as it changes, and needs external links from other pages to the page.
 
And, think -

However, we suspect there really is no magic bullet, and if there is, Google et al will rapidly nullify it! We think that search engines really do try and rate a page on its interest and relevance to the declared subject, because that matches what their audience wants, which is pages listed that match the relevance of what the search word or phrase was. That in turn makes users trust a particular search engine to deliver.

Paid for SEO
None of this so far needs professional assistance - unless you need that for creating your page content.
 
Once you have got your content sorted out as above, and with a good process of continuing update and new material addition, then you can think about spending direct money. Google ad-words perhaps, or one of the professional SEO organisations.

Think like a search engine user, and make sure your pages contain what you think the people you want to attract are looking for.