SEO Explained

Google have been working on the algorithm to determine the ranking of a page for over 10 years, and are now very good at evaluating how well a site fits these criteria. It is constantly changing and improving.

The best approach for a good ranking: make sure your site is accessible, easily readable, and contains the relevant content people might be searching for.

It is no coincidence that these attributes are what constitute a good website in general.

Let's break it down. Ultimately, you want to ensure that:

• Your site is accessible
• Your site is user friendly
• Your content is useful and well-written
• Your pages have good titles
• Your URLs can be easily understood
• You post, share, and promote your website wherever you can (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, relevant forums).

A simple content example

If you happen to run a bakery in Strathalbyn, then you would want to make sure that your site clearly explains this in your content. People could be searching for the terms "Bakery in Strathalbyn" or "Where can I get good pies in strath", so you would want to check that these "Keywords" appear on your site. It's important to think about what relevant users might search for:

• Business name/nick-names: Brighter's Bakery, BB
• Goods: pies, pasties, donuts
• Services: catering, corporate lunches
• Locations: Strathalbyn, "strath", South-east Adelaide, Adelaide Hills
• Questions: "What is the best pie in South Australia?"

Also, note that Google and other search engines are smart enough to use synonyms and plurals of words as well, so keywords often don't have to perfectly match.

At Brighter, we are experts at helping your website reach it's intended target audience.

We work on all the different angles behind good search engine optimisation - authoring, technical and marketing.

Content Authoring

The most crucial part of your website. We can help your plan your website content structure from start to finish. Then we can help with copy writing, photography, image sourcing and ongoing content generation.

Technical Best Practices

We ensure your website is built with SEO best practices in mind ensuring it has the foundations to reach it's potential and is structureally sound.

We design and develop responsive websites to meet the W3 WCAG 2.0 AA Standards resulting in an accessible, user-friendly website that is received well by search engines.

Ongoing Marketing Strategies

We can help you grow your websites search ranking and put strategies in place to help ensure it reaches it's intended audience. 

Google Analytics
One of the best tools for analysing the data about your site visitors. It includes a breakdown of:

• How visitors came to your site
• Who visitors are (i.e. mobile? desktop? country?)
• Popular content

Google Webmaster tools
Similar to Google Analytics, but with a focus on how your site interacts with Google itself.

Google Trends
Raw access to what people are searching for.

SEO Guidelines
A good guide for what to be aware of when optimising your site's content.

Webmaster Guidelines
Best practices to help Google find, crawl, and index your site.

Relying on meta-data
Several years ago, hidden content known as meta-description and meta-keywords were used to define a site for search engines. However, these methods have been used and abused maliciously to the point where search engines no longer carry any value for them. There is no harm in still using them, but they now have little to no impact on rankings.

Using images to display text
Images can't be easily indexed by search engines.

Non-responsive sites
Sites that don't cater for all screen sizes aren't considered usable by google which will factor in heavily when they consider your website ranking.

Confusing URL's
Avoid URL's (website addresses) that are not human-readable. i.e. www.brighter.com.au/pgSystem/1048542/index.php?post=ajhYg1&date=120930

Aggressive link building
Links from other website to your site (referral links) are one of the many ways you can increase your page ranking. However, Google is very good at evaluating the quality of these and can apply penalties to your site if the links are of a low-quality (i.e. "spammy"). There are even cases where sites have been black listed for participating in large-quantity spam linking.

Keyword "stuffing"
Over-using the important keywords will not help your rankings, especially since search engines can very easily evaluate the frequency of a particular word on a page. More importantly, it is detrimental to the experience of everyday users of your site.

From an end-users point of view, someone types what they are looking for into www.google.com, which returns a list of pages that are ranked by their relevancy.

Depending on the search term used, there may be advertising surrounding the 'natural' (non paid-for) results as well.

How does google get these results?

Google has a variety of tools that "crawl" almost every accessible page on the internet. These crawlers (called "spiders") scan and then record a variety of data from the pages they visits. This creates an "index" of the web, which Google can quickly access when you perform a search.

A Google search returns the pages in this index that most closely match your search terms, ranked by relevance.

How do sites appear at the top of the search results page?

Only the most relevant results will appear at the top of the list, but how are these judged to be relevant? Appearing towards the top of the search results will likely mean more attention (and thus visitors) to your website.

Google will rank your page on a large number of factors, which include:

• Do the search terms appear in the text?
• Or in the header?
• In the URL (a.k.a. address)?
• How often does the query appear on the page?
• How quickly does the site load?
• Is the site easy to use?
• Is the site reputable?
• Do other sites link to this site? (i.e. is it popular?)
• How many of these links are there?
• What are the quality of these links?

There are over 100 different attributes which determine how well a site will rank on the search results.

You can watch this presentation from Google's Matt Cutts (3:15 min), which provides a very simple description of what happens when a search is executed.