What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (or ‘SEO,’ as it is most commonly known) is, in a nutshell, what you can do to make sure your site gets the best possible position in the search engines. SEO has evolved into a vast and complex science all of its own; we can’t cover it in its entirety in one blog post, but we can explore the basics and give you a good grounding in its dark art.

The three factors in SEO

SEO in three parts

There are three main factors to SEO:

1. Key words and phrases for your website that need to be incorporated into your webpages to ensure a good ranking in search engine searches.
2. The technicalities of deploying these key words and phrases to maximum effect
3. External factors, over which you might not have much control, but which do have an impact on your site’s ranking.

It’s important to note that there aren’t any secret tricks a webmaster can do to ensure a good position, and you can’t buy a good site ranking. The best you can do for your site is to make it as interesting and engaging as possible, fill it full of relevant and useful content, and follow our advice.

1. Key words and phrases

The actual text that is on your website pages is one of the major things the search engines look at when they are trying to classify your website. You therefore need to make sure your pages contain the words and phrases people will most logically use to type into Google, or another search engine, if they are looking for a website such as yours. These are referred to as keywords or key phrases.
To work out what keywords you should focus on for your site, do some brainstorming with a pen and paper to come up with a list of the words and phrases you yourself might use if you were searching for a site like yours. But there’s a catch. You can’t be too generic, as the internet is a crowded place. If you show up on page ten of Google, people won’t find you, so you need to choose keywords that are neither too much in demand, nor so obscure that only a tiny number of people will be looking for them—that way, you might find yourself at the top of the list, but attract only a handful of site visitors.

Let’s take an example: if you type ‘B and B France’ into Google, there are 1,360,000,000 results. You would stand very little chance of coming up high enough in the listing to get any site visitors with this sort of competition. However, if you try to be a bit more specific by typing ‘B and B Normandy,’ the number of competitors gets much more reasonable—at 2,950,000, though, this is still pretty challenging.
‘B and B Normandy Coast’ has a smaller number of sites listed for it—1,440,000—and if you are just a little more specific, you’ll find that ‘B and B Etretat’ has even fewer (308,000) sites returned. So in this case, you might consider concentrating on both ‘B and B Normandy Coast’ and ‘B and B Etretat’ as good key word strategies. This should help to catch people looking more generally for somewhere to stay along the Normandy coast, as well as people who already know precisely where they want to stay.
You could also get a little bit creative and think of other ways to catch potential visitors—for example, if you Google ‘Weekend break in Normandy,’ you will find 260,000 sites listed, so it may be worthwhile including this key phrase as well.
When you have worked out your keywords, take a look at your page text and see how you can rework it. Your major keywords need to be at the top of your home page, preferably in a title, and repeated in the body of the text a couple more times, too. It’s important, however, to keep their inclusion natural-sounding. You don’t want them to read show-horned-in.
Focus on your major keywords for your home page; you can choose less-important keywords for the secondary pages on your site—for example, to continue with the previous example, the site owner might create a page listing activities in and around their area, and choose the following key phrases to focus on: ‘Activities on the Normandy Coast’ and ‘Things to do around Etretat.’ These pages may attract visitors, and they’ll also boost the position of the site as search engines will comprehend the pages as worthwhile and relevant material in the same broad area of interest.

2. Implementing key words and phrases

When you have your page text ‘optimised, you need to consider the more technical side of things. We’ve seen how the text you put into your pages is essential for the search engines; the following technical aspects are also crucial:

• The way you ‘title’ your pages (this is the page title seen at the top of your browser window when you’re on a page)
• The ‘description’ you assign to each of your pages (this is the description of each page that you will see listed in Google underneath the page title)
• The key words you choose to associate with the pages (the latter is the least important aspect of the three)

WordPress has a number of plugins that allow you to input this information: you might want to look at All in One SEO Pack or WordPress SEO by Yoast.
As well as the text on your webpages, it’s important to meaningfully name and label any images that you include, too. This can help boost your site’s position for the right keywords. Instead of keeping a string of numbers (e.g. IMG_1397.jpg) or assigning a random name to the file, before you upload it, name the image purposefully sot that it includes your main keywords. For example, ‘b-and-b-normandy-coast-front.jpg.’ Be sure to complete the ‘Title’ and ‘Alternate Text’ fields in the Media Library, as well (e.g. ‘B&B Normandy Coast, front view of the house’).

3. External factors

You’ve now done what you can do to prepare your site for the search engines, as far as the site itself is concerned. But there are two other major factors that determine how your site will be ranked:

1. How much traffic it gets
2. How many relevant inward links it has (that is, other people mentioning your site on their website and linking to it)

How much traffic you can send to your site at the outset depends on how much traditional and word-of-mouth marketing you can do; trying to achieve inward links from other sites in the same broad area as you is also essential— it sends Google the message that your site is recognized by others, and therefore deserves a good ranking.
At the beginning, you may only have a little traffic and just a few inward links, but with consistent promotion, you will see both increase, and will be able to watch your site moving up in the rankings.
Building a website doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Alannah Moore’s Create Your Own Website Using WordPress in a Weekend demonstrates how anyone can create a website that looks professional, while being entirely tailored to their needs and preferences.

Create Your Own Website Using WordPress in a Weekend
Alannah Moore
Buy it now!
RRP for print edition: £14.99