Hi. My name is James Marriott and I am the owner of NBM Web Designs.
This article will form the first part of a series of articles I intend to write with the aim of trying to pass on all my knowledge of SEO and provide answers to the many questions that are asked about SEO, as well as dispelling some of the many myths that surround SEO. I intend to keep this article up to date meaning that it may change slightly from time to time. If this does become the case then I will create a changelog to make it easier to track those changes.
This particular article will concentrate on what I consider to be the very basics of SEO intended for those that have either never heard of SEO or have only just now started to research it. This will be reflected in the language used through-out the article but even if you are more familiar with the subject, please do spend the time to read it as you might just learn something new (or you may spot an error!). After this, I will create other articles that will explain SEO in much more detail.
What is SEO?
SEO (pronounced "ess ee oh") is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation.
We can split that up into two parts (ok, we could split it into 3 parts, one for each of 'Search', 'Engine' and 'Optimisation' but in this instance, the first two form a single expression) giving us 'Search Engine' and 'Optimisation'. We can now explain each as:
Search Engine
In it's simplest form, a search engine is a database containg details of websites. The front end of a search engine, the page you visit to search the internet is designed to search that database for websites, and in a lot of cases individual pages, that contain terms defined by someone browsing the internet who has entered words, names, phrases etc. into the search box* and displaying the results of that search. The two most well known examples of this are Google and Yahoo.
* Technically this isn't strictly how a search engine works but for the sake of the subject and keeping things simple, this definition will surfice and won't distort the content of this topic.
Optimisation
This represents what we are trying to achieve when we create websites with an interest in improving the position our website is placed in a list of results provided by a search engine. We want our website to appear as high up the results as possible aiming for at least the first page with the Holy Grail being the number 1 spot.
I just know that anyone reading this that does already know SEO will be cringing at these 'definitions'. I know this because I am too! Rest assured, these will be covered in much more detail in the next chapter.
Should you concern yourself with SEO?
That depends on many things including why you want a website, what you want from it and who you are designing it for but again, I'll simplify it to "Does the position of your website in the results page of a search engine matter to you?" If so then yes, you should definately concern yourself with it. If not then no, probably not and infact, there may be reasons why you would NOT want your website, or pages of your website, appearing in any results page.
What do you mean "probably" not?
Because you should never say never. An examples of a situation where you might want to at least give it thought could be where you're designing a personal website for yourself or you only design personal websites. Whilst at the start you may not be interested in other people finding the website, as those that you want to know of it's existance can be told individually, you may at a later date decide that you want to share something with the world and it is so much easier to think of this from the start than trying to 'optimise' your website later on. Additionally, a very important factor in SEO is content writing. Understanding this could dramatically improve the written content of your website (which will be covered in more detail later) but as with any personal website, this is a choice only you should make.
Terminology
The following are list of terms that you will probably come across when you get involved with SEO (again, at this point, definitions are simplified and may well be mentioned again in the next chapter with more advanced / technical definitions).
Keywords:
You may well be familiar with keywords as it is almost impossible to not come across the mention of them in any website article. These are words and phrases that describe the theme of your company, your website and the individual pages of your website. Keywords will probably be mentioned more than any other word or phrase thoughout any SEO article.
Page Rank:
If "Keywords" is the term you will see, hear and speak of the most then "PageRank" will be the second.
NB: The term "PageRank" is a registered trademark belonging to Google and will be referred to a lot in this guide but where it is mentioned I mean to refer to PageRank and any other similar system employed by search engines.
PageRank is NOT the position within those results that a website is placed. Page rank is how much more or less important a search engine believes your website to be relative to other websites with similar content for the search terms used and will use it as part of the decision in determining website positioning in a list of search results.
SERP('s):
This is an acronym for "Search Engine Results Page".
The page showing the list of websites returned from a search.
Index / Indexed / Indexing:
This does NOT refer to a websites index page (normally the 'home' page).
This will be explained in more detail in the next chapter but in short this referes to whether or not a website's page(s) have been saved by a search engine.
* Although you can't do anything to guarantee that a search engine will index pages from your website, you can control which pages are NOT indexed.
Spiders aka Robots, Web Bots:
These are the programs that scour the internet looking for web pages to index.
Dispelling the myths
We'll end this chapter by dispelling some common myths about SEO and SEO strategies (and there'll be the odd fact thrown in just for good measure):
Conclusion: Now we've reached the end of this first chapter, let's take a quick look back at what we know so far. We know that SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimisation" and we know that SEO is about improving our websites so that they appear higher up in the list of search results, known as the SERPs or "Search Engine Results Page". We know that search engines (such as Google) order these results based on the "Page Rank" of each website's pages. The inclusion into the results pages relies on the page being "indexed" by "robots" or "spiders".
This first chapter has given us a very brief (and 'loose') insight into SEO. In the next chapter we will take a closer look at indexing, the behaviour of those robots/spiders (including how we can tell these robots what to do and what NOT to do) and we will take the first step in making changes to our websites to improve the SEO.
Please feel free to comment about this article, ask for more information or if you feel that something should be amended.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
About the author
James Marriott is the sole owner of NBM Web Designs and is a full-time freelance website developer.
This article will form the first part of a series of articles I intend to write with the aim of trying to pass on all my knowledge of SEO and provide answers to the many questions that are asked about SEO, as well as dispelling some of the many myths that surround SEO. I intend to keep this article up to date meaning that it may change slightly from time to time. If this does become the case then I will create a changelog to make it easier to track those changes.
This particular article will concentrate on what I consider to be the very basics of SEO intended for those that have either never heard of SEO or have only just now started to research it. This will be reflected in the language used through-out the article but even if you are more familiar with the subject, please do spend the time to read it as you might just learn something new (or you may spot an error!). After this, I will create other articles that will explain SEO in much more detail.
What is SEO?
SEO (pronounced "ess ee oh") is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation.
We can split that up into two parts (ok, we could split it into 3 parts, one for each of 'Search', 'Engine' and 'Optimisation' but in this instance, the first two form a single expression) giving us 'Search Engine' and 'Optimisation'. We can now explain each as:
Search Engine
In it's simplest form, a search engine is a database containg details of websites. The front end of a search engine, the page you visit to search the internet is designed to search that database for websites, and in a lot of cases individual pages, that contain terms defined by someone browsing the internet who has entered words, names, phrases etc. into the search box* and displaying the results of that search. The two most well known examples of this are Google and Yahoo.
* Technically this isn't strictly how a search engine works but for the sake of the subject and keeping things simple, this definition will surfice and won't distort the content of this topic.
Optimisation
This represents what we are trying to achieve when we create websites with an interest in improving the position our website is placed in a list of results provided by a search engine. We want our website to appear as high up the results as possible aiming for at least the first page with the Holy Grail being the number 1 spot.
I just know that anyone reading this that does already know SEO will be cringing at these 'definitions'. I know this because I am too! Rest assured, these will be covered in much more detail in the next chapter.
Should you concern yourself with SEO?
That depends on many things including why you want a website, what you want from it and who you are designing it for but again, I'll simplify it to "Does the position of your website in the results page of a search engine matter to you?" If so then yes, you should definately concern yourself with it. If not then no, probably not and infact, there may be reasons why you would NOT want your website, or pages of your website, appearing in any results page.
What do you mean "probably" not?
Because you should never say never. An examples of a situation where you might want to at least give it thought could be where you're designing a personal website for yourself or you only design personal websites. Whilst at the start you may not be interested in other people finding the website, as those that you want to know of it's existance can be told individually, you may at a later date decide that you want to share something with the world and it is so much easier to think of this from the start than trying to 'optimise' your website later on. Additionally, a very important factor in SEO is content writing. Understanding this could dramatically improve the written content of your website (which will be covered in more detail later) but as with any personal website, this is a choice only you should make.
Terminology
The following are list of terms that you will probably come across when you get involved with SEO (again, at this point, definitions are simplified and may well be mentioned again in the next chapter with more advanced / technical definitions).
Keywords:
You may well be familiar with keywords as it is almost impossible to not come across the mention of them in any website article. These are words and phrases that describe the theme of your company, your website and the individual pages of your website. Keywords will probably be mentioned more than any other word or phrase thoughout any SEO article.
Page Rank:
If "Keywords" is the term you will see, hear and speak of the most then "PageRank" will be the second.
NB: The term "PageRank" is a registered trademark belonging to Google and will be referred to a lot in this guide but where it is mentioned I mean to refer to PageRank and any other similar system employed by search engines.
PageRank is NOT the position within those results that a website is placed. Page rank is how much more or less important a search engine believes your website to be relative to other websites with similar content for the search terms used and will use it as part of the decision in determining website positioning in a list of search results.
SERP('s):
This is an acronym for "Search Engine Results Page".
The page showing the list of websites returned from a search.
Index / Indexed / Indexing:
This does NOT refer to a websites index page (normally the 'home' page).
This will be explained in more detail in the next chapter but in short this referes to whether or not a website's page(s) have been saved by a search engine.
* Although you can't do anything to guarantee that a search engine will index pages from your website, you can control which pages are NOT indexed.
Spiders aka Robots, Web Bots:
These are the programs that scour the internet looking for web pages to index.
Dispelling the myths
We'll end this chapter by dispelling some common myths about SEO and SEO strategies (and there'll be the odd fact thrown in just for good measure):
- Google is the chosen search engine for approximately 70% of searches.
- Keywords are not as important to your Google PageRank or SERP's positions as some will have you believe although Yahoo does view them with a closer eye.
- Subscribing to 'Link farms' is not a good idea and often results in a website being blacklisted from search engine results!
- Good, solid content will show better results than any other single factor.
- A high PageRank does NOT guarantee top positions in the SERP's.
- PageRank can go down as well as up and is subject to change on a monthly basis (often referred to as the "Google Dance").
- You MUST NOT get too hung up on PageRank. People will keep referring to it as some kind of Holy Grail but please try and not get drawn into the hype.
- When researching SEO on the internet, always take note of the date that the articles were written!
- In order for an SEO strategy to work effectively and continue to do so, you can't just spend a week optimising a website and then leave it. SEO is something that requires constant work although the majority of this work, assuming the strategy was completed correctly and compentently will be checking statistics with perhaps the odd modification.
- It is not a good idea to create the website content for search engines. Design your website and it's content for your customers.
Conclusion: Now we've reached the end of this first chapter, let's take a quick look back at what we know so far. We know that SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimisation" and we know that SEO is about improving our websites so that they appear higher up in the list of search results, known as the SERPs or "Search Engine Results Page". We know that search engines (such as Google) order these results based on the "Page Rank" of each website's pages. The inclusion into the results pages relies on the page being "indexed" by "robots" or "spiders".
This first chapter has given us a very brief (and 'loose') insight into SEO. In the next chapter we will take a closer look at indexing, the behaviour of those robots/spiders (including how we can tell these robots what to do and what NOT to do) and we will take the first step in making changes to our websites to improve the SEO.
Please feel free to comment about this article, ask for more information or if you feel that something should be amended.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
About the author
James Marriott is the sole owner of NBM Web Designs and is a full-time freelance website developer.
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