Chris Anders - Internet Strategy Consultant

Website Marketing & Search Engine Optimization ( SEO )

If you have ever performed a search in Google you'll have observed that a simple search can reveal a lot of results! For example a search for "London Restaurant" brings up close to 2.75 million results. If you are managing the website of a restaurant in London and want anyone to find you how on earth do you compete against so many other sites?

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short) is all about helping people find your site. Like any other marketing process it starts off with you spending time thinking about who your customers are and what your competitors are doing.

Searches on Google, Yahoo etc

The words people use to make searches on Google or Yahoo are commonly referred to as "keywords". The aim of a Search Engine Optimization exercise is to perform as well as possible for particular keywords - in the above example if you came first for "London Restaurant" the chances are that you would get a lot of people visiting your site! Previous research suggests that if you can get to the #1 spot you are likely to get up to 40% of people clicking through to you. This falls rapidly as you appear lower in the results and if you are not on the first page it is dramatically lower (e.g. the study referred to showed that only 0.66% of people clicked through if you were first on the second page).

So what does this mean in terms of your strategy? Many organisations make the mistake of blindly choosing a keyword and then deciding that they want to be number #1 in the search results for it. For example a charity might decide it wanted to be Number 1 for the term "childrens charity". This can be a HUGE mistake!! If anyone could develop a site and get it to #1 for any keyword they chose the Google index would be pretty meaningless and after a while we'd probably all stop using it - clearly not in the search engine's interest!

Keyword Research:

The first step in any SEO exercise therefore is to research what keywords you should target. Keyword research will be covered in greater detail in other articles but at a high level you need to consider:

i) how do people actually search for organisations like mine?
ii) what keywords do they use?
iii) how many people currently search for these phrases and where are they?
iv) what is the competition from other sites for these keywords?

Going back to our "London Restaurant" scenario for example. If you just chose the keyword "restaurant" you'd be competing against every other restaurant in the UK. "London Restaurant" would be an improvement and "Italian Restaurant London" would be better still. The secret in choosing keywords is to choose phrases that are specific to your business but that are not so specific that its unlikely that many people will ever search for them.

Search Engine Optimisation Next Steps:

Once you've identified the keywords you want to target you are then ready to get on with your site. Future articles will cover the technical setup of your site, writing content and promoting your site online.