Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is a way of getting visitors to your site without having to pay for advertising. For those who don't want to tackle the steep learning curve involved in making pay-per-click (PPC) ads cost-effective - or who can't afford it - SEO provides a good alternative.
It's true that SEO takes longer to bring in traffic than PPC, but once the foundation is laid, the main work involves regular tweaking, careful vetting of potential link partners, and keeping an eye on SEO forums to keep track of changes in search engine algorithms. Advertising, on the other hand, is only effective for as long as the campaign lasts, after which the site can sink without trace if no effort has been made to develop "natural" ranking by optimising for search.
So what's involved in SEO?
Optimising your site for the search engines should start even before your site is built. The first step is to decide on the most likely phrases which your target market would search for if they were looking for your product or service. These phrases are called "keywords," even though they almost always contain more than one word. Spend some time brainstorming for the most useful phrases and make a list, with the ones you think are best at the top.
Once you have your list, you need to research the actual searches which people are using online, and how many sites are already targeting a particular keyword. It's no good optimising your site for a keyword that hardly anybody ever searches for, and similarly, if there are 2 million other sites already chasing a particular search term, you would probably be better finding another which has less competition. All the statistics relating to the number of daily searches on each term and the number of sites which are optimised for them needs to be collected. By calculating the best ratio between searches and sites, you can find out which are the best terms to target. So long as these terms are appropriate, you can select one or two and start optimising your site for them.
Now that you have your main keywords, you can start to write the copy for your site, using your keyword and related terms as part of the text - but not over-using it, or the search engines will mark your site down as spam, and blacklist you. The keyword term will give you the main subject of your copy, and should be used 2 or 3 times: in the title tag, at least once in a headline, and also (if possible without making the page unattractive to your human visitors) highlighted with italic or bold in the main body of text.
The next step is to get inward links using your keyword as the anchor text from other sites, which must be sites related to your site's main focus. These should preferably be one way links, but if you can only arrange this by paying for them, don't! Google (the search engine with the lion's share of search engine traffic) will blacklist any site found paying for links (or to put it another way, any site linked to by a site which advertises paid-for links).
Another way of obtaining one way links is to write articles about subjects related to your site's main topic, add a small signature file with a link to your site, and offer them to article directories. Webmasters from other sites will very often use articles from article directories on their sites, including the signature file (this is a condition of their being allowed to use them). In this way, the author gets a link to his or her site from the site which publishes the article.
You can also arrange reciprocal links (also called link exchange) with other sites - which means each site places a link to the other. These are not the best, but they can be helpful, and you may even get a few visitors from them. If you are going to employ link exchange as part of your SEO strategy, you need a links page and another page with a form for webmasters to offer their link and give you the address of the reciprocal link on their site, for you to check. Moderated linking is best, or you will end up getting gambling sites and others which are not relevant to your site. These can actually harm your status in the eyes of the search engines.
Although seen by search engines as resources for visitors, in reality links pages are of most interest to the search engines themselves.
The rule about not buying links does not apply to directories. Most directories charge a fee for inclusion in their listings to cover administration and discourage spam. Some of these, for example Yahoo, charge this fee annually. Despite the cost, entries in the better directories are very good for your status in the eyes of the search engines and will help your site to rise higher in their listings.
Regular additions to your site, in the form of original articles about your subject area, are also very helpful, because Google and the other search engines like sites that change or grow regularly.
Unfortunately, search engines (specifically Google) do not like sites that appear with all links, directory submissions etc in place, overnight. So in order to be effective, SEO has to be done over a period of time to avoid triggering their anti-spam procedures. This means that SEO is not a one-off activity, but must be done on an ongoing basis throughout the life of the site if a good ranking is to be achieved, and then maintained.
It takes some time to obtain a good placement, but it can make a big difference to your bottom line if you are on page 1 of the listings for your particular keyword. This is why choosing the right keywords is of such importance from the very beginning.
Whether you choose to employ a professional to implement your SEO strategy, or to do it yourself, Search Engine Optimisation is a useful way to improve traffic without the ongoing costs involved in advertising.
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