The vast majority of "Organic" Internet traffic originates from Google, Yahoo and Bing. Getting good listings on these Search Engines is what all website owners strive for.
A quick Googling of "Search Engine Optimisation" will throw up a bewildering mixture of sites, mostly commercial offerings but some reference sites. Anybody who has the time to wade through these and make any sense of it all, feel free, for those who would rather cut to the chase, I have attempted to create a practical guide to what's actually important.
Wikipedia offers a summary here - Wikipedia Search Engine Optimisation, it's very dry but it gives you a good overall definition of SEO and some history, but what practical advice does it actually give you, the website owner, to help you optimise your website and improve your search engine rankings? For me, there are only 2 snippets of interest...
"Google values sites that deliver quality content, relevance, easy navigation and an overall user-friendliness to the site’s visitors"
"Google was originally designed to rank sites mostly based on the number of inbound links they were receiving from other sites. In other words, the more site A was used as a “reference” the higher it would rank"
So, what does Google say about preparing your site for, well, Google?
Again, their webmaster guidelines give you a fair amount of information which will mean very little to the layman, but for the purposes of getting on with our lives I will summarise in 3 points...
Perhaps the most significant statement on the page is "Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.", which, at first glance, seems a bit rich coming from this multi-billion dollar behemoth of a search engine that relies entirely on "pages" for its staggering success, but there is a logic behind this apparent championing of substance over style. Google's success depends on users continuing to "Google" when they're looking for something, and users want relevancy in their search results, surprisingly they're not impressed that you're number 1 in Google if your website is slow, ugly, difficult to use or if the content is irrelevant to their needs.
Good question, believe it or not, there are lots of great websites hidden within the dross. Google's (and other search engines') challenge is to bring these websites to the top of their search results and they have been working on this for many years, and to give you an idea of the size of the task, take a look at Google's Matt Cutts explaining how a search works.
There are billions of web pages in their indexes, and they are constantly refining their algorithms to improve the quality of their results. There are also many individuals and SEO 'experts' looking to circumvent their effort in order to finesse the results in their favour, usually for short term but potentially lucrative gains.
As a website developer, I'm constantly frustrated that these so called SEO experts spam my clients with the latest wheeze to get to the top of the search results, if they are so good, why do they have to spam or cold call you? Whatever they recommend, unless it involves improving the user experience it will either be completely useless or, at best, short lived. The reason for this is that the algorithm refinements that Google make are aimed at removing websites with poor user experience from their indexes. In the worst cases, the sites might even be banned from their results altogether.
By definition experience is subjective, a good experience for me might be a terrible one for you, so how could Google or anybody else say when an experience is good or bad, well, action speaks louder than words.
If I was a Google engineer looking to measure the quality of search results in relation to user experience, I would check how long a user spends on each web page before returning to the search results page. I would use this information as a measure of the relevance of that web page in relation to the search term. Over time I would use this data to refine the results in order to display those pages that users spent more time on. However, I'm not a Google engineer and if they're not doing this, I claim the copyright!
The assumption, of course, is that the longer a user spends on a website after clicking from Google's search results, the more they liked it e.g. a good user experience. If they clicked on a link and returned to the search results page 8 seconds later, it was probably a bad user experience. Somebody who clicks on a search result and doesn't return probably found what they were looking for (an excellent user experience!).
I suspect Google does measure this to refine its results. For all it might say about simple navigation, fast loading sites, nice design, great content, etc., these are mostly subjective and require human beings to make judgements. Well, guess what, they are, they either stay on your website or they return to Google to look for something better.
Every website owner needs to look at their website statistics to see what's going on. One of the most useful metrics is the 'bounce' rate, this is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. The higher the bounce rate, the less relevant that page is to the user.
There are also a number of assumptions you can safely make when putting a website together...
Yes, but all links are not created equal.
Inbound links, or backlinks, do 2 things for your website. They provide additional sources of traffic and they cast a 'vote' for your website, again, here is a reference from Wikipedia - Backlinks.
Again, please feel free to read the whole article but there's only one phrase I want to focus on...
"Backlinks from authoritative sites on a given topic are highly valuable. If both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic, the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have a strong influence on the search engine rankings of the webpage granted the backlink."
In a nutshell, this means that the backlink must come from a website considered authoritative by Google, it must be relevant (e.g. the content on the referring web page must have some resonance with the content on your web page).
So what's the best way of getting backlinks to your website? Before we go any further, let's get one thing out of the way. There's a huge industry dedicated to link building, most of this activity violates Google's Webmaster guidelines and without going into all the things NOT to do, let's focus on the one and only thing that you should be doing...
Hang on a minute, that sounds suspiciously like creating a 'Good User Experience'.
It's a bit of a Eureka moment when I explain this to my clients. The secret of Search Engine Optimisation is to build a website that people actually like. Most of the SEO stuff peddled by 'experts' is crap, sometimes it works for a while but mostly it doesn't. And, even if they improve your rankings and even drive some additional traffic to your site, if their experience is bad, they will only leave and you will drift out of the search results again.
Another good question! Assuming Google continues to eliminate much of the attempts to manipulate their search results by rewarding good user experience, is there a future for SEO? In this video Matt Cutts of Google gives his opinion...
So, it turns out that all you really have to worry about is making sure your website provides a good user experience, but is that more easily said than done?
Much will depend on how you approached the development of your website in the first place. In my 10 years as a Website Developer, I have met hundreds of prospective clients and in that time I have learnt which ones I would prefer to work with. Intuitively I know which ones are likely to succeed and which ones I suspect will fail, I don't want to focus on the reasons for failure as these can often induce bad memories, instead I prefer to focus on the successes, and a list of common characteristics of these successes...
It might seem arrogant to imply that I look for these characteristics in a prospective client, but bitter experience has taught me that a client who doesn't understand their own products or market, who focuses on cost over quality or treats the development of their website as an inconvenient hurdle, will quickly become a slow paying, blame shifting, short-term client, and nobody wants to spend their time dealing with clients like that! Do they?
In the end, I believe that prospective clients who get the idea that a great website is based on the concept of providing a 'Good User Experience' for their customers is likely to have all the right characteristics, and I would prefer to work with them.