The big question facing website owners who want to optimize their website is how much importance they should place on on-site factors compared to off-site factors?

On-site SEO looks at not only your title, meta description, heading, images, links and content, but also your domain name, your page naming, and your website structure. Off-site SEO looks at how to generate visibility for your content.

It is a simple equation…

Optimized Content + Visibility = Ranking

If you optimize your on-site content and don’t do any off-site SEO then you will only rank well if there are not many competing web pages.

However if there are a lot of competitors for the words you want to rank for, then you have to do some off-site SEO, and how much depends on the amount of competition.

Likewise, if you don’t try and optimize your web pages for on-site seo factors, and just try and get the visibility for your site, then you will also find it is much more difficult to rank well.

Getting good search rankings is a matter of doing both. At the end of the day, a search engine is just a super computer which tries to make sense of the words on your site (the on-site factors) and the links and words on other sites (the off-site factors), and if you connect them both, it will make the search engine’s job a lot easier, and your results a lot better!

You can find out how to optimize your site for on-site factors and which off-site methods are most effective by getting our SEO course online. If you are in the UK we run SEO training workshops from time to time in London.

This post is for complete beginners who don’t know the first thing about SEO.

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is the science of improving your search engine rankings. In the old days SEO used to involve making sure you have the right words in the right place on your webpages but those were the days when there was very little competition online.

Today there are BILLIONS of web pages online and depending on your niche and geographic location, you will have to compete with a large number of other websites.

For a search engine like Google to understand which are the best sites, it not only analyzes the words on your web pages (on-site factors) but it also places a very high importance on external indicators of how good your website is (off-site factors).

Google includes more than 100 different factors in its algorithm, which in simple terms is the formula it uses to rank web pages, and it constantly updates its algorithm to try and give users the most relevant results.

One of the main things a search engine like Google is looking for is “social proof” that your site is good. Your website can claim you are the best at what you do, but if there is no-one else talking about how good your website is, why should Google put it on the top of the search results?

The on-site factors are still very important, because after all, pages are made up of words, and words have meaning, and the search engines job is to understand the meaning of the words on the page. You will find that it is easy to rank for a very specific phrase, such as your company name, where there is not much competition.

However the more competition there is for the words you want to rank for, the more social proof you are going to need, and therefore SEO focuses just as much on how to get that social proof.

1) On-site Factors deal with the words on your pages and the structure on your site.
2) Off-site Factors deal with how to get social proof that your site is the best.

Your first step in SEO training should be to understand what people are searching for so you can use those search terms in your SEO campaign. Find out more here about keyword research.

HISTORY OF SEO

In the early days of search engine optimisation, it was enough to simply your website had the right words in the right place to get good search rankings. However webmasters started to abuse this by stuffing keywords into their pages so they could rank even for search terms not related to their website.

The search engines first got round this by changing their algorithm to include a measure of “link popularity”. This basically measured how many links you had to your website.

BUT… webmasters soon started to realise they could get better rankings by adding their website URL into “link farms” and by reciprocal linking with other sites in order to get lots of incoming links.

SO… the search engines fought back by analysing not only how many incoming links a website has, but also how relevant those incoming links were.
A link from a relevant or authority website is much more valuable than a simple link from a non-relevant site. Think of it like a “vote”.

THEN… came multiple directory listings… Some seo companies created hundreds of vertical directories and you could pay them to have your website listed in directories which were most relevant to your business. While this might give some relevance, Google has a 10,000 mile view of the web and it can detect when a site suddenly gets hundreds of new incoming links…

SO… Google now looks at not only the number and type of links you have to your site, but the quality of those links and the pattern of those links over time.

In order to understand the quality of the sites linking to your website, Google also tries to understand their on-site relevancy as well as their off-site relevancy, for example are they “authority” or trusted sites like Wikipedia, and is there a lot of “buzz” about them in the news or on social networks, or how many people have bookmarked them on social bookmarking sites.

Now that you know you can’t just get a good ranking by ensuring you have good keywords on your page, and paying for a bunch of links, lets look at how to go about it the right way…. Just sign up on the homepage for our free SEO training videos about keyword research and you will be well on your way to getting good search rankings.

One of the usability problems search engines are constantly facing is how to present results for the best user experience. Since Google introduced Universal Search in May 2007 we have not seen much change to the main interface but it looks like soon we will. The problem with usability is there is only a limited space to display search results from all the different channels or databases, for example, News results, Video results etc… and although Google does offer the opions at the top of the browser …

… they are not that visible. Well Google has been testing out a new 3 column interface which is similar to Bing and Yahoo and shows the search options in the left hand navigation. Danny Sullivan first mentioned this in November 2009 on Search Engine Land – Recently I have been getting the new user inteface also on Google UK and I am expecting that it will be rolled out very soon. It looks like this…

The main differences are…

a) There are 3 columns by default

b) The navigation in the left column shows all the “Show Options” navigation from the current user interface…

…and furthermore the search engine shows icons next to the most relevant search options. For example in the search above for “cricket” there are icons next to “News”, “Videos”, “Blogs” and “Images”, but if you search for something else like “e-learning” the options shown are “Everything”, “Books” and “Blogs”.

If you click on “News” you get a “Top Stories” link in the left nav. If you click on “Videos” you get the option to choose duration (short (< 4 min), medium, long(=20 min) as well as the high quality and the source (youtube, google, veoh, metacafe, etc…) . If you click on “Images” you get a number of very useful options which include size, type and color.

Another very cool addition is the Live Updates which shows real time search results, which include comments from Google Buzz, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook as well as top stories… Note the slider bar at the top which shows the activity over the past 24 hours. You can move the slider to any part of that bar.

One thing that seems to be noticeably missing from the main icons in the left navigation is Google Product Search. These results are still included in the standard search results as “Shopping results” and appear near the top of the main results when searching for a product like a “laptop” or “freezer” but if you click on the “More search tools” link you will get the option to have “More shopping sites” or “Fewer shopping sites”. Maybe this is coming… we will have to wait and see.

SEO TIPS

For the past couple of years, your SEO efforts should have been focused on how to get visibility not only in the standard web results, but also in all of these other channels such as news search, video search, local search, etc… If not then it’s time for you to do some online SEO training and find out what you should be doing.

Once the new interface rolls out, the more of these channels you can appear in, the more visibility you will get, of course so long as these channels are relevant to finding your product, service or website.

Google just launched its interest-based advertising solution which allows you to target your ads on the content network at users based on interest. You can either target users who have visited your site already OR you can target using interest-based categories for example travel or sport.

This can be very powerful if you want to increase your brand visibility because you can have your ad appear to the same user multiple times on different sites that they visit in the content network.

What you do is copy and paste a remarketing tag (or snippet of code which you get when logged into your Google Adwords account) onto your website and then in Google Adwords you go to the “audiences” tab and create an Ad just for this “remarketing list”. If someone visits your site and gets “tagged” by the cookie then if they visit a site on Google’s content network, Google will recognise their cookie and your ad may be displayed. Since they have already visited your site, you are increasing your brand awareness and customer mind share.

If you want your display ads to be shown to anyone who visited your site no matter which page then you need to put the tag on all pages on your site, but you can for example tailor the campaign so the ads are only shown to people who visit a specific page on your site by just putting the tag on that page. For example lets say you want to target only users who visit your contact page but don’t leave an enquiry, then you could just put the tag on your contact page.

There are many other useful ways of using Google’s new remarketing tags and you can get more information about this on Google.

When doing keyword research you need to understand not only what your customers are searching for but where they are searching from. Google’s Trends and Google Insights can be used alongside the Keyword Tool to give you comprehensive market research data.

Google’s Keyword tool will allow you to see the previous month’s global actual search volume as well as the local search volume in any country where it has a search engine presence. There are big differences from region to region in the words people use to search with. Here is a good example.

In the table below, UK was selected as the local market. You can see the UK has about one quarter of all (global) searches for  (14,800 compared to 60,500)

Now in the US  is another name for .

In the table below you can see in the US there are 49,900 searches a month globally for (i.e. more than for ) however in the UK there are only 2,400 searches a month (i.e. much less than for ), so it is very important that you know what words people are using to search for your product or service in the country or countries you are targeting, and these keyword tools will help you find out.

The Google Keyword Tool shows you the estimated search volumes (based on actual searches from its database) so you can make a decision which keywords or search terms have enough search volume to target.

However to compare different countries or regions to understand whether there is a difference you can use Google Trends.

Google Trends

Google Trends will tell you how the number of people searching for your product or service is moving over time or whether there is any seasonality in demand.

For example here is the Google Trend for and for the last 12 months. For some reason there seem to be an increase in demand in June and January.

Google Trends is also very useful because you can very quickly compare the relative importance of up to 5 search terms.

So for example instead of using the Google Keyword tool, with one search we can see that in the US and Canada, gets more searches than but in the UK, is a much more common term”.

If you are marketing your products and services in multiple countries then this kind of information is essential before you start marketing.

IMPORTANT: A common mistake that many people make is that the bars against each country indicate where countries have the greatest volume of searches. However this is wrong.

This chart does not mean that Canada gets more searches than the US… What it means is that in Canada, is searched for more frequently as a percentage of total searches done on Google compared to US and UK…

To see the absolute volume of searches and understand which country gets more searches by volume you need to use the Google Keyword tool which we first used, and select each country one at a time.

Google Insights

Google insights is similar to Google Trends but more powerful.

Some of the advantages of this keyword research tool over Google Trends are …

1) You can narrow your search down to specific categories. For example if I wanted to research the word “monitor” I can select the category “Computers and Electronics” if I am mainly interested in computer monitors.But if my business related to heart rate monitors I would select “Health” as the category.

2) We can look at whether there is any seasonality of searches. With Google Trends you can see this but all on one timeline. WIth Google Insights, you can compare different years all on the same graph as in the diagram below which compares searches for “flowers” comparing years 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. There is a clear spike in February and May for Valentines Day and Mothers Day. You can check in your own industry whether there are any seasonal trends and you can use this information when planning your marketing activity.

3) You can compare the level of interest for a particular search term across up to five different countries or regions. As with Google trends, this does not indicate total search volume but the “level of interest” relative to all searches within a particular country.

4) You can search the relative volume of searches on other Google properties such as Google Images, Google News, or Google Products.

5) You can see the top 10 searches for any category (such as products) in any country, and also the fastest rising searches.

This keyword tool gives you a thorough insight into your niche market and you can plan much better which words you should be optimizing your web pages for.

The following video demonstrates in detail how to use Google Trends and Google Insights for your keyword research.

When you search for something on a earch engine, you also get results of pages which are closely related to the word you searched for even if they don’t contain the actual word.

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, i.e. not just the spelling but the way humans understand words. For example “buy” and “purchase” mean the same.

As humans we know these words are the same, but how do search engines work this out?

There is a concept called “Latent semantic indexing” or LSI which allows a search engine to understand what a page is about by referring to a database of semantically related words.

However there is some debate about whether Google actually uses LSI or some other word or phrase co-occurrence technologies. Either way, it is a fact that if you have related words in your web pages and use “themes” in your website you are more likely to rank higher.

Google has a great free tool called “Google Wonder Wheel” which shows you search terms related to the main word you are interested in, and allows you to explore relevant search terms which you can include in your website.

To use the Google Wonder wheel you simply need to do a search… Then click the “Show Options” link on the navigation bar.

Google Show Options Link

Then on the left navigation you will see many different ways to refine your search. One of these is Wonder Wheel. When you click on this you start with your main search term and the words which google understands are related to it. In this example we started with “bags”. Clicking on “gym bags” opens another wheel with words which are more closely related to gym bags. You can keep on refining the niche to reveal the best words to use on your site if you want to build a theme around a certain topic.

Google Wonder Wheel

This short video shows you how to use the Google Wonder Wheel

Google’s keyword tool is more than adequate for your keyword research needs for a small site, and most of the paid search tools pull exactly the same data from Google’s database and just present it in a different way.

Having said that paid keyword research tools help you save some serious time if you are doing a large amount of keyword research or if you need to get data from more than simply Google’s database.

This video shows you how to use Google’s Keyword Tool to understand whether people are actually searching for your product or service, and if so what search terms are used the most.

Search Engine Optimization starts with Keyword Research. The mistake most people make when setting up a website is they do not do their keyword research properly. They aim too high and try and rank for very competitive words which for a new site might take years to rank for.

You need to understand firstly how much competition there is online for your product or service and also what words people use to search with. So here are 3 steps you need to do at the beginning of your SEO campaign.

1. Define your niche – how much competition for your product or service.
2. Understand Your Customers – i.e. what words are your potential customers searching for?
3. Broad, phrase, or exact search volume – understand the difference.

Step 1 – Defining Your Niche

Let’s say you sell catering equipment for restaurants, the chances are that you want everyone to find you when they search for “catering equipment“. You want the whole world to find you, so you have decided to optimise your site for the search term “catering equipment”.

The mistake most people make is optimizing their website for a broad search term like this without checking how many web pages they have to compete with to rank for this search term. You can easily find this out by doing a search on Google and looking at the results bar…..

Google Results Bar shows number of results

There are actually over 4 million results on Google.com for “catering equipment” and unless your site is well established it is going to be quite difficult to rank high for this term.

Furthermore you are going to be competing with sites selling catering equipment for households as well as catering equipment for restaurants.

What you should really be doing is focusing on your own niche “catering equipment for restaurants” and optmizing your site for this niche.

But you also need to understand what words people are using to search with…

Step 2 – Know Your Customers

The next step is to understand exactly what your customers are searching for, and the best place to do this for free is Google itself. Google has a number of free keyword research tools which for most SEO purposes will be all you need to use.

The most important of these is the Google Keyword Tool which you can find by simply searching for “Google Keyword Tool”.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

To use this tool first select your country where you want to market or you can select All countries as in the example below. Secondly ensure the checkbox “Use synonyms” is checked (which it should be by default).

The first thing to note in our example “catering equipment for restaurants” is there are only 12 searches a month for this term, but if we look at the synonyms we can see there a number of other terms which are relevant with a much greater search volume.

Google Keyword Tool

We can see that “restaurant equipment” gets 246,000 searches a month and “restaurant catering equipment” gets “40,500″ searches per month so it would probably be better to optimize for one of these terms as we know these are the words people are searching for.

HOWEVER… We also need to go a step further….

Step 3 – Broad vs Phrase vs Exact Search Volume

By default Google will show you the number of broad match searches.

A broad search for “restaurant catering equipment” means that the words “restaurant” and “catering” and “equipment” or a variation or synonym or singular/plural of these words occurred somewhere in the users’ search.

For example the person could have searched for “supply catering equipment to restaurants”

A phrase match would mean that the whole intact phrase “restaurant catering equipment” occurred in the search. So for example the person could have searched for “find restaurant catering equipment suppliers“.

An exact match would mean that they searched for the exact term “restaurant catering equipment” with no other words in the search term.

Using “Phrase” or “Exact” search volumes would be a better indiciation to choose the keywords you want to optimize your site for.

If we change the keyword match to “Phrase” instead of “Broad” we get the following results. We can see that instead of “40,500″ searches per month for a broad match for “restaurant catering equipment” there are only 480 searches a month when using Phrase match, but that there is still a very high volume of searches for “restaurant equipment“.

Google Keyword Results

The problem is the “restaurant equipment” niche is even more competitive than “catering equipment” which we started with. A quick search on Google shows us there are over 9 million competing sites and without an established website it would be difficult to appear on the first page….

Number of results for your Search Term

So we need can go one step further … We can now take the phrase “restaurant equipment“, plug it back into the keyword research tool and see if there are any search terms with a higher volume than 480 per month….

Using the same settings with “Phrase” match we can see that “commercial restaurant equipment” and “restaurant equipment supply” both get around 2,900 searches a month and for our example would be a good choice to optimize for.

Phrase Search results

IMPORTANT: Don’t limit yourself to one search term.

In fact you need to be building a list of the most relevant keywords because by choosing related keywords and synonyms you are feeding Google information about your website. By finding related search terms Google will have more confidence about the main topic of your website.

If you have a website and it is not on the first page of Google then you are probably losing a lot of potential traffic.

In highly competitive markets it is going to be very difficult to rank on the first page of Google which is why there has been such a focus on niche marketing by the SEO industry. And because of this there are now a lot of companies offering SEO services. This raises 2 questions. First should you outsource your SEO to an agency? Second. If so how much should you pay them?

Q1. Should you be using someone else to do your SEO?

This really depends on a number of factors.

• Is your website your main source of income? If so then it can be risky giving someone else the power to improve your rankings OR to destroy them if they follow bad seo practices.
• Do you actually have time to do the SEO for your website? If you only one website then you can probably do all the SEO you need with 2-3 hours work each week. However if you are an affiliate marketer with numerous websites then it can be too much work to do everything yourself.
• How technical are you? In fact you don’t need to be technically minded to get good search rankings if you start with a good content management system (CMS) which does the technical side of on-site optimization for you.

Q2. How much should you be paying someone else to do your SEO?

Because of the obvious advantages of ranking on the first page of Google, a large number of SEO companies have sprung up advertising that they can get your website to the top of Google, and you can get quite competitive rates, but can you trust all of them?

The problem is that a lot of companies have jumped on the bandwagon and are offering SEO services without the relevant experience and it is easy to get a site de-indexed from Google if you do the wrong thing.

For example you will see sites agencies offering to get you 1,000 links to your site for less than $100. The problem is these links will only help if they are quality links, otherwise you will be wasting your money. Secondly Google specifically does not like paid links which in effect these are, so you even run the risk of damaging your rankings. Google has ways of detecting unnatural linking patterns.

There are good (white hat) and bad (black hat) methods of doing your search marketing, and if you want to outsource you need to understand exactly what the agency is going to do for you.

Learn SEO

If you understand the principles of SEO and search marketing you will not only understand what needs to be done to get good search rankings, but also whether you have the time to this yourself or whether you need to outsource.

Our SEO Training course will give you the knowledge you need to make these decisions, but before you can understand what needs to be done you need to understand why Keyword Research is so important to the results you will get. Go here to get our our free keyword research course