Some simple SEO rules

There are some simple guidelines that can help you make your website more visible. Here they are :

  • Update the website regularly. Google measures the website often through its algorithm, and uses the age of the page as a guide to its relevance.
  • Try to centre the text around the topics that are relevant to the areas that you want to engage customers in. So, if you are selling insulation to Siberia, information on low temperature of materials is likely to be relevant, whereas if you are selling products in the Caribbean salt water resistance is likely to be more pertinent.
  • Don’t be afraid of including details about products
  • If the marketing department complain, still don’t be afraid of including details of products! When you provide background information about a product you have the chance to naturally mention the terms that you are hoping to rank for without spamming the customer and annoying the Google algorithm
  • Get a friend in a different part of the country to check how your pages are ranking 
  • Try to link to relevant background material
  • If your pages do not rank for the terms you are trying to optimise then keep editing the pages and ask the technical team to think about what else can be done 

Typical SEO terms

Google algorithm

Google algorithms have had an array of interesting update names through the years. Google Hummingbird, Google Panda, Google Penguin and Google Pigeon to name a few. The function of these algorithms is to make the search engine that decides where pages sit for any particular search term and increasingly, geography. There are very many factors to take into account and the weighting of these factors does change with time, generally in order to make searches ever more relevant. Given the success of Google through the years they have done a decent job !

Ranking factors

You may hear much discussion of ranking factors. These are the weightings given to various factors in the algorithm such as those described above. 

Organic ranking

Organic ranking is simply the position of a page based entirely on its own merits without being paid to appear highly. Google adwords and other paid ranking exist as a tol to advertise products on the web and generate cash for Google at the same time 

Adwords, impressions, PPC and CTR

Adwords is the mechanism for paid advertising on Google. PPC and CTR are terms used within an Adwords campaign. 

PPC is the amount paid per click on the advert, and CTR is “Click though rate”, the percentage of the time an advert on Google is activated. Generally higher CTRs result in a lower payment per click as the page is seen as desirable by Google. So, if your CTR is high, your PPC is low. 

CTR is defined as the number of actual views (or clicks) as a function of the number of times when the advert appears on a screen which are called “impressions” 

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