Let’s kick off our brand new series of features on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) by defining what’s meant by SEO and why it’s important to your website.

First, a few things it isn’t. SEO is not a fixed set of actions that if taken will propel you to the top of Google for all eternity. It is not a one-time only project. It’s not about forking over hundreds (or even thousands) of pounds of your hard-earned to someone who guarantees the top spot in Google (more about that here). Fortunately, it’s also not the mystery it might appear.

SEO, practised properly, is a permanent factor in your web design, your copywriting, and your online business strategy as a whole. In other words, it’s more of a mindset than a project. It’s all about making your website as accessible and easy to find as possible.

Why SEO is important for your website
Basic rule of SEO: largely, what makes a site accessible for your human visitors will work for search engines, and vice versa. If your site is laid out so that people and bots can find good quality, relevant information quickly and easily, you’ll perform well whenever someone searches using an appropriate term.

So, the chances are you’ll bring in more visitors the more relevant, useful and well-structured your site is. And the more relevant, useful and well-structured your website is the easier visitors will find it to track down what they’re interested in and the more likely they’ll be to hang around. More visitors means more potential sales, higher ad revenue, and ultimately a fatter bank balance.

What does SEO involve?
We’ll go into all of this in more depth in future articles, but you can probably divide site optimisation into three broad categories: what to do with your website code, what to do with your copy, and building links.

What to do with your website code is a series of articles in itself, but here’s a couple of hints.

First and foremost – keep it clean! There’s a code validator at W3C that you can use to check that there’s no errors or broken links within your website – the fewer there are, the easier the search engines will find it to navigate around your site.

Secondly, be careful about your use of Flash and images. Both are great tools for making your website more engaging for your human visitors with good eyesight, but while they can cope with images and Flash (although I know a few people who might argue that point when it comes to Flash!), search engines (and visually-impaired visitors accessing the site through a special screen reader) can’t – so any text you put within an image or a Flash banner is going to be largely invisible to Google, Yahoo! and the like. Make sure you keep images for illustration rather than explanation, and give them an appropriate alt attribute (often called ‘alt tags’) to help search engines and screen readers work out what they’re missing.

When it comes to copy, keep it relevant, engaging, and as brief as possible to make it easier for visitors and search engines to find what they need. If you’re selling products or services, make it immediately clear what you’re selling and why it’s great. If you’re an organisation, tell people straight away what you do, where you are and how that’s relevant to them.

Use keyword research to find out what words and phrases you need to focus your website around in order to attract searchers. Tools like HyperSubmit SEO can help, but it’s also worth keeping an eye on the search terms people use to reach you and what competitors are doing. Consider what you might search for if you were after information on your subject of choice. Those are the terms you need to make sure are in your copy. Once you’ve got your keywords identified, you can work on structuring your web copy, keyword density and tackling the long tail – we’ll talk about that later!

And finally, link building. Search engines tend to consider a link to a website as something like a vote for that site. So, theoretically, more links = more votes = higher position, right? Well, not quite. Links from a website on a topic that’s appropriate to your own will be thought more relevant, and a link from a popular site like the BBC carries more weight than a link from a newly-created blog. Bought links are prevalent, but frowned upon. We’ll talk more about how to develop a strong link building strategy in future articles.

Any questions or comments?
We’ll be delving into all of these topics in more depth in future features on this blog, but as always we welcome your thoughts.

If there’s something specific you’d like us to blog about, leave a comment and we’ll see what we can do. If you have an SEO success story and fancy having it blogged here, why not drop us a line?

We know there are changes we can make to improve the Daily.co.uk website, incidentally – don’t worry, we’re on the case!