Search Engine Optimisation Primer

We want to do a series of posts that outline the pros and cons of various types of online marketing; these posts will help explain when and how to best use the right online marketing channel to meet you specific needs.

We thought we’d start with the bedrock - search engine optimisation (SEO) and give you a quick run through of the advantages and the disadvantages an SEO strategy has for your online business.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

Each major search engine has a search index - a catalogue of all the websites and web documents they have found.  Search engines find and record web documents with robots (aka spiders and crawlers), automated programmes which they send out over the Internet to follow links and record what they discover. Each time a robot finds and retrieves a web document it is added to the index.

The index is analysed and assessed for relevance against search query terms (keywords). This analysis uses mathematical calculations containing a range of criteria set by the search engines’ engineers and is called the relevance algorithm. This process of algorithmic calculation of keyword relevance has been coined “organic search” or “natural search” to differentiate the results in the search index from paid search advertising results that also appear in the search engine results pages (SERP).

There are two main areas that the search engine assess in their relevance algorithms, each containing a multitude of factors that collectively add to or detract from a document’s relevance:-

• On-site factors
• Off-site factors

Search engine optimisation is about understanding the factors at play and trying to make a website or individual page adhere as closely as possible to each positive criterion and avoid the negative criteria.

On-site factors

On-site factors can be broadly broken into two main areas:-

• Information architecture
• Content

Information Architecture

Information architecture is the structure and navigation of your website, how pages are categorised (taxonomy/facets) and named (nomenclature), how page templates are structured (the code flow) and all the elements that represent the build of your website and how you mark-up and signal meaning to the search engine and human users. Some example, elements affecting information architecture are:-

Website Level Factors

• Domain & Subdomain names
• URL structure and canonical resources
• Navigation methodology (structure, hierarchy, taxonomy & nomenclature)
• Link authority distribution and flow
• Page template (layout & code flow, element positioning)
• Accessibility levels

Page Level Factors

• XHTML document validation
• Anchor links methodology and distribution
• CSS methodology
• JavaScript methodology
• Image deployment methodology & captions
• HTML Title (Title tag) taxonomy & nomenclature
• Meta Description
• Page Heading (H1 tag)
• Subheadings (H2 - H6)
• Semantic mark-up
• Body copy

Information architecture to use a building metaphor is the building regulations and specification, the materials and construction methods, the fixtures and fittings - in other words the shell of the house. A well built house does not just occur - it needs a good architect, developer and builder with an understanding of all the requirements. The same goes for optimising a website’s information architecture - you need a team that understand all the elements in play.

Website Content

Content is the textual copy you put in the website. Search engines rely on text in some shape or form to allow them to understand topics and keywords. If the keyword is not in the content it is unlikely to be relevant - pretty obvious but it does need saying.

If it is not in the page it cannot be found!

The keywords you are marketing must be in the content.

Your content should match what you want to be found for, not just in the specific, but in rounder terms. So copy and content should address the specific, broader and generic topics within your offering.

Your content is placed into the information architecture - so just as how you decorate and furnish a house can make or ruin your home - the same holds true for a website. What you name things, the language and vocabulary you use, where you place these words need to be done correctly. Content optimisation is about ensuring best practice is followed and utilising systemic approaches to place the right type of words within the right website and web page elements.

Off-site factors

Offsite factors can be broadly attributed to link authority (also known as link analysis, link reputation and link juice). Link authority constitutes a large portion of the search engines’ algorithms, and specific examples of link authority elements within the algorithms are PageRank, Hilltop, HITS,  and TrustRank.

Link Authority

Link authority is the practice of attribution of “authority” between websites by the structure of their linking patterns…

Who links to you and how they link is a large element of search engine ranking.

In simple terms the more links you have pointing to your website from topic relevant websites the better your website will rank as it is seen to be endorsed by all the referring links of your topic peers.

This is a simplification of the complexity of all the different factors that influence the flow and attribution of link authority, but it will suffice as a broad explanation of the principles. So part of the optimisation process is about developing ways of getting relevant inbound linking pointing to your website to optimise it for the search engines relevancy algorithms of which link authority constitutes a major component.

Using our house building metaphor link authority is like getting the mains gas, water and electricity connected to your house, inviting your friends and neighbours over for a house warming and getting your address details updated with all the banks, utilities and officialdom - in other words it’s about getting connected and bedding into your environment.

What SEO seeks to achieve

SEO is designed to drive targeted and qualified traffic to your website using the website’s architecture and relevant content that is attractive and useful to the consumer combined with inbound linking from external websites.

The term “qualified traffic” is one of the central principals behind SEO. Qualified traffic is defined as visitors who are receptive to your message and your offering. Qualified users are actively seeking information or solutions related directly to their search keyword and you are hopefully offering them a solution to that search.

Qualified traffic is therefore of great commercial value because you know the user is a better prospect - and this intrinsic quality combined with the low cost-per-acquisition for organic traffic means SEO is a very powerful marketing tool.

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons that are found with SEO.

Advantages of SEO

SEO presents the online marketer with a range of key advantages that make it the heavy-weight of digital marketing:-

• Qualified users
• Traffic volumes
• Low cost
• Always on
• Scalable
• Long-tail
• Longevity

Target audience - qualified users

SEO traffic consists of self-selecting users who are actively looking for something you have on your website. This offers excellent audience targeting - and makes traditional above the line advertising seem like a very expensive shot-gun approach. SEO surgically selects an audience appropriate for your offering.

By refining and optimising the website’s information architecture, content and inbound linking you can further improve targeting. Analysis of click-stream data (web traffic), keyword research and competitor analysis allow you to hone your SEO strategy even further. The beauty of a well optimised SEO strategy is that because your audience discovered you they are more receptive to what you have to say - you did not force some marketing upion them- and this tends to make them more amenable to your message and offering.

Traffic Volumes

When comparing comparable positions - i.e. #1 SEO vs. #1 PPC the levels of traffic one can receive organic SEO listings vs. paid search advertising (PPC) listings is generally at least twice the volume (2 x traffic) - although this figure can be as high as ten times the volume (10 x traffic) .

This is a massive advantage when trying to reach your audience and gain market share. Because the volume of search traffic is skewed towards organic listings, SEO has a decided advantage over paid search.

Low Cost

SEO is one of the cheapest forms of online marketing because there is no direct media cost. The operating cost for SEO comes from three areas: -

1. The cost of your website which includes your frontend website and backend CMS architecture - both must be capable of controlling optimisation and deploying data in the right elements.
2. The cost of ongoing content provision and optimisation.
3. The cost of your linking strategy - getting links from other websites takes time, effort and resources that need to be ascribed to your SEO cost-per-acquisition (CPA) calculations

However, the cost of your website and ongoing content provision are not costs associated directly with SEO as these are sine qua non for a web business; but the requirement for your website to be SEO friendly and for your content to be optimised will push up costs. In relative terms these cost are minor when compared with the benefits provided by SEO traffic.

As a rule of thumb SEO CPA costs will generally be between a third (33%) and a tenth (10%) of PPC cost for the same traffic (keyword traffic volumes) depending on the market.

Visibility: Always On

As natural search is free there are no restrictions on the display/impression rates of your website’s results as one would find with paid search ads - if the website is relevant for a search it will be returned in the results 24/7.

With paid search, unless you have very deep pockets and never run out of daily budget, it is often the case that you will at some point spend your money for that day - at which point your adverts stop displaying.

An SEO natural listing will show continuously meaning it has much better visibility.

Visibility: Scalable

Because the volume of traffic from  SEO has no relationship to cost/budget it is easy to roll out new products and offerings without having to increase costs - you merely publish the content on your website and wait for the search engine to find it. If your websites IA and inbound linking are well optimised this new content should get listed pretty quickly (24 - 48 hours).

If you want to grow traffic by adding new products to a paid search campaign you’ll need to find some more money in the budget. Just adding the ad groups without the extra budget means you’ll just be dividing the attribution of traffic, not actually increasing traffic volumes.

For this reason we can see that SEO is more scalable - the level of traffic you can develop is independent of direct budget and is related to what content you have - your offering.

Visibility: Long Tail

The long-tail 20/80 - 50/50 distribution model is a great way to explain web traffic. If you look at websites’ click-stream data you’ll see the keyword referrals can often be broken down into something approaching this model - i.e. about 20% of keyword searches account for 50% of the traffic, and 80% of very low level keyword searches account for the other 50% of search referral traffic.

With a good SEO strategy and solution you’ll find you can elongate the tail so you move from the classic 20/80 - 50/50 to something like 20/80 - 30/70 with much higher volumes of low level search traffic. Why is this?

The part of the search algorithms that deal with content rely on keyword lists - this is all the words on the page (excluding stop words) broken down by frequency to create a matrix. So the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty would be as follows:

Word	Frequency
humpty	3
dumpty	2
king’s	2
fall	1
great	1
horses	1
men	1
sat	1
wall	1

Most web pages contain a broad range of keywords. Most optimised web pages contain an even greater range of keywords. When trying to optimise for highly competitive keywords the optimiser will be trying to activate topic and semantic matching and gain a boost in algorithmic calculations by broadening the vocabulary. A by-product of this longer keyword list (broader page vocabulary) is that for less competitive search terms you now have a much wider raft of potential keyword combinations that can trigger a relevance match and return your website to the SERPs.

In this way SEO and optimised content can outstrip PPC by an order of magnitude or more in the generation of long-tail entry points. Given that most PPC campaigns also have restrictions on the total number of keywords you can have per ad group and the advantage in the long-tail with SEO becomes even more pronounced.

Why is the long-tail so important? Well it really boils down to probability - only so many people will search for the most likely keywords, so if you want to try and reach all of your potential market, you need to be visible for the more obscure, oblique and precise ways some of your potential customers might be thinking and searching. The broader the base of potential entry points you initiate, the more traffic you will gain.

The other advantage of a long-tail strategy is that the specific or highly detailed nature of the keyword queries often means these people arriving on your website are really very qualified indeed. They are looking for something very specific and you have matched their need - so your company or brand is winning ‘brownie-points’ for utility and making their life a little easier straight off the bat.

Longevity - Long-term marketing

Websites I worked on back in 1998 are still performing brilliantly in the major search engines - that’s ten years of low cost traffic - and these websites were receiving tens of millions of visits per month back in 2003. Now imagine how much that would have cost to buy that traffic?

If you understand the principles of information retrieval and create a logical hierarchy in your navigation (your category taxonomy), use good keyword selection in your naming conventions (nomenclature) and progressively add great content and create a resource people want to visit and link to, then SEO is going to work for the foreseeable future, with some minor tweaks for any algorithm changes. Unless text and hyperlinks vanish from the web and people no longer need to search for things, SEO is going to work.

The web is a dynamic environment, but SEO solutions are like stone - they endure - because at their heart they rely on functions of the web that will not change - providing great content in a logical way. Yes additional types of optimisation are now required - video, images, maps, news search are all new channels to be exploited, but the underlying web search that powers most traffic has not gone anywhere - nor will it. Even the most radical development in computer AI-cognition or contextual understanding is still going to return your web pages because your SEO website is offering the searcher a rich information resource - and that’s what search engines are in the business of finding for their users.

Longevity is the reason why SEO is the logical bedrock of any online marketing strategy because it means all the advantages mention above are going to be around as long as your website is live.

Disadvantages

SEO requires time and effort to get results - it is not an overnight solution - but for those serious about their online business, here are some of the shortcoming of SEO you should be aware of if you wish to use it within your online marketing mix:-

• Time
• Commitment
• Competition
• Algorithmic changes

Time

SEO is not an overnight solution. It takes time to establish and gain momentum. The majority of SEO activity will be registering in the search engine some time after you did the work. This is because there are a series of things that need to occur before the algorithm will rank you. You may get lucky at times and get things listed overnight, but this is usually new content on a well established website; if you go from a standing start expect a lag of at least a week and up to two months before you see real changes. The factors ate play are:

Spider visits - the search engine needs to find your website and send its robot/spider through the site to record the link structures and content. This can take anything from a few hours to a fortnight depending on what techniques you use and how lucky you get.

Link velocity - this is the speed at which your website is gaining inbound linking. Too slow and you website will seem like a lame duck; too quick and/or uniform and the search engine might call foul. Another factor is that the search engine will need to see links if you are going to rank - so the time taken to gain enough links is going to affect the speed at which SEO can be deployed.

Link analysis - the search engine does not just have to spider your website - it has to spider every website pointing to yours if you are going to benefit from their link authority. Making the spider see your inbound links is impossible unless you game the system and “push” the spiders in the right direction - so this process can take anywhere from a couple of days to a month for each link to be found.

Search update - the algorithm will perform an index update periodically - Google no longer “dances” with major index updates, but uses an everflux rolling update across the index - a refresh if you like. These refreshes are meant to be daily - however, experience shows the impact can be longer with changes being displayed from anything from 12 hours to a week after changes are made. This means for your website to be included in one of these recalculations both your website and your inbound linking websites will need to have been spidered first. If the search engine has not spotted all your inbound linking, or spidered all your website content, then it’s going to find calculating these into the search results difficult! Updates on all of the sites linking to you can take weeks - and this is the major hurdle to speed when working with SEO and why we see a lag of between 1 to 8 weeks for most work undertaken.

Sandbox - new domains tend to display a quarantined effect in Google in what SEOs term the “sandbox”. Whether this is a deliberate measure to stop spammers launching a quick succession of websites for link authority manipulation (link farms) or the result of eigenpairs interpretation of nodes within the algorithm is not entirely clear. But there is generally a suppression of new website results in the Google index for between 4 and 8 months. When developing a new website this can be largely overcome by placing a holding “blog” on the website on day 1 of the project so when you come to launch the website proper you’ve negotiated a big chunk of the sandbox.

Commitment

An SEO strategy takes commitment - you need to add regular content to your website, you need to interact with your online market and community, you need to establish relationships with key publishers and bloggers to act as your PR machine, and you need to develop systemic solutions to link development - offer users something they want so they link to your website - this can be something like a resource (events director or calendar, consolidation of some key data, a calculator or tool etc). This all takes time, effort and commitment. However, this activity is not out of the ordinary for any web business - or at least it should not be. Any offline business requires the same level of energy and commitment, and online is not different in that sense - where it is different from off-line is that on-line this work does not diminish as quickly, and over the years you will see considerable benefit in the search algorithm results from these more permanent activities and links.

Competition

SEO is a competitive environment and you are fighting other websites for the position at the top. So standing still is not an option if you don’t want your competitors to pass you by. If you follow the basic precept of adding great content and engaging your audience, then this will not be an issue. The other thing to remember is other SEO operations may use unscrupulous tactics to push you from a top position and elevate themselves there, so you need to know how to counter these threats and how to spot and report this type of activity to restore the status quo.

Algorithmic changes

The search engines change algorithms - that’s a fact of life. Anyone working in SEO will remember the infamous “Florida” update on Google of November 2003 that saw wholesale changes in the index. This was brought about when PageRank was upgraded with Hilltop and other small algorithmic changes such as stemming - the long and short of it was that those websites with lots of off-topic inbound linking suffered once the dust settled and those websites with relevant inbound linking thrived. There was a period of about 8 weeks where everyone’s results went slightly pear-shaped - Google were finding the right balance with Hilltop and until they had the opportunity to tinker with the algorithm on the live index there were a few weeks of headaches.

But we only saw minor position changes for us, rather than the wholesale dropping out of the index reported by some webmasters and SEOs. The reason was that our linking was mostly on-topic and relevant. As I said before - if you understand what universal qualities search engines will try to calculate and make sure your website has these qualities your website will prevail any algorithmic changes - you’ll just need to fine tune for each major algorithm update.

So although algorithmic changes will occur, by taking the right measures in advance in your general strategy you should avoid major disruption.

Conclusion

I hope you found our whistle-stop tour of the major benefits and minor shortcomings of SEO useful and it has spurred you into further enquiry. As previously stated if you are serious about your online marketing strategy and long-term traffic generation, then SEO is a sine qua non.

SEO provides qualified users, high traffic volumes at low cost, it’s always on, it’s scalable, it will reach even the most obscure customers with its long-tail matching, and it will provide you with all these over the lifetime of the website - so nothing matches SEO’s ability to help market your online business.

Over the coming weeks we’ll drill down into the depths of SEO and help explain some of the finer points and offer you some tips and insight as to how you can make things work a little better.