Competition

You may have decided on your own keyword priorities but you must also check out the
competition for those keywords. Selecting a word or phrase already prioritised by a
multitude of competitive sites will see you struggle for visibility. Try to find words or
phrases that appear ignored or underutilised by your competitors. An alternative but
higher risk approach is to see what keywords are used by competitor sites and then
attempt to outmanoeuvre them by better use of links, content and meta tags.

Competitive Advantage

A place to look for keywords is where you enjoy some competitive advantage. How are
your products or services differentiated? What are the real strengths of your business
compared to your closest competitors? What proprietary advantages do you enjoy? What
is it you do better that may persuade prospective purchasers to visit your site?

Search Volumes

You should use a word or phrases that have sufficient search volumes for your needs.
You can find out about search volumes by checking with Word Tracker software or
Yahoo’s Overture keyword suggestion tool. Read more about these tools below.

Category Priorities

The first thing to remember is that the number of keywords you can use on any one site
or page has a finite limit. A general recommendation is that there is an overall limit of 20 individual words. In my opinion – due to other factors – the limit should be drawn much
tighter than this. Rather than a limit of words, I prefer, a limit of characters – including
spaces - of no more than 64. In essence, you must be sufficiently focused to sum up the
key priorities of your business within this limit – typically no more than 6 to 8 words.
The only way around this limit is to have an endless number of pages on an endless
number of sites – all optimised, monitored and updated on a regular basis.

Keyword Selection - Factors

Keyword selection is the first search specific discipline. Having explained that spiders
read and index text, we find that some text is more important than others. That text is
keywords. Valuable keywords are the words or phrases that prospective customers use
when searching in your market category. Keyword selection is therefore crucial and has
implications for so much else within search. I have drawn up a list of factors that should
be taken into account when selecting keywords.

Researching your Market Category, Customers and Competitors

Good SEO also requires a thorough understanding of the market category within which
the search project and web site will compete. What is the category size and how is it
developing. What other channels to market are there? What information is available
regarding their behaviour and attitude of customers? What role in the buying process is
played by the search marketing? Who are current and likely competitors? Once the above
is fully grasped you can proceed to the first real activity of SEO; Keyword selection.

SEO 1 - The Pre-Site Phase

Search engine optimisation is a marketing discipline. It is not a stand alone function.
Before any specific optimisation activity is undertaken it is essential that two areas are
non-search areas are appraised:

Understanding your Organisation’s Online Business Strategy
Good SEO requires a through understanding of your organisation’s overall business
strategy. How does search fit in with activities such as advertising, e-mail and direct
marketing? Is there a marketing plan? What does it say about objectives, strategy and
budgets? What is the overall direction of the business and what can search contribute?

How Search Engines Gather Information?

Search engines gather information by crawling web sites. They crawl from page to page
visiting sites already known and by following the links that they find. Whilst crawling,
the robots, or spiders, gather information from the source code of each site and then send
back that information for indexing. The Spiders were designed to read HTML code or
code related to it such as XHTML or PHP. The Spiders find it difficult to read pages
written in Flash and some other popular web programmes. Spiders cannot directly read
Java Script or images. They can however read the alt tags which may be provided with
GIF, JPEG or PNG images.

The Four Phases of an SEO Project

In addition to definitive information about the workings of search engines, there is much
speculation, myth and rumour. There are many spurious ideas in circulation and applying
them may do more harm than good. In this section, I will try to stick to tried and trusted
conventions.

How to Optimise Your Site

Introduction
This section describes the key processes undertaken to obtain a higher organic ranking
with the major search engines.
How search engines work is part of their proprietary knowledge. The exact workings of
their algorithms are closely guarded commercial secrets. However, guidance to how these
algorithms (or algos) work can be found or deduced from various sources. Some general
guidance is available free, directly from the search engines’ own web sites. Some
guidance can be found from examining the various Google and related patents. Some
general guidance can be found from authoritative articles on SEO forum sites. However,
real world applications of this knowledge can only be found by experimentation and trial
and error.
There are some general rules. Applying them will provide a route to improved search
engine visibility. The guidance in this section could be broadly applied to the three main
engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. However, given its dominance, much of the advice
is derived from my interpretation of the Google “Hilltop” patent of 2001. The patent is
believed by SEOs to have been the basis of the so-called Google “Florida” update of
November 2003.