Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 1

This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.

In this blog I will focus over the course of the coming weeks on increasing traffic coming from search engines, and then more precisely the traffic coming from organic Search Engine Results Pages (or SERP). I will try to shed some light onto how to easily improve your Organic Search Results Ranking, the process also known as Organic SEO. Did I lose you already? No worries, let’s just start from the top.

What is SEO? Wikipedia tells us the following about Organic SEO:

“the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.”

Figure 1: Search Engine Market Share

Ok, unpaid search results, that sounds good. Now which search engine should I optimize for? Which ones are available on the market and does my target market play a role in this? The figure on the right gives you a good idea of the key players in the Search Engine market. Agreed, if you live in the UK you might be thinking to yourself “AOL…yeah right!”, but if you wish to target the US market as well, then the relevance of AOL certainly comes into play. Concentrating on the UK market here, it is fair to say that Google is the main player, so I will focus my attention on that particular search engine.

Now, when I do a search in Google, I get a page with many different sections. Which section am I aiming to get top rankings in? What is Paid search and what is Organic? In figure 2, organic search is shown in the green colour, and makes up the largest area in the search results. The other areas are called “Sponsored links” and the rankings are determined by bidding on keywords.

Figure 2: Organic vs. Paid Search Results

So what influences the ranking of your website for a certain search term? Google has never disclosed any exact algorithm that is used to prevent incorrect use of it, but besides tips listed hereunder, I would say the key in all of this is RELEVANCY.

A first step in achieving SEO is actually tracking your site performance. To do this, register on Google and go to the Analytics section to register your site. You will be asked to place some tracking code in your website, so you will need access to your website code. This tracking will make it possible to analyse your site and see where your visitors come from and through which source (direct, referring site or through a search engine).

Now then, let’s see some factors that influence the ranking of your site and how to optimise those.

A good starting point in my opinion is always to make sure your (X)HTML structure is good. This starts with validating your pages (not just the home page!) and CSS file. This can easily be done by using an online tool for XHTML or CSS validating. A quick search gave me this as a place where I can do this http://validator.w3.org/.  Validation can for instance tell you if you have an image in your site that does not have the ‘alt’ property set. A meaningful ‘alt’ and ‘title’ property on an image can aid your image in showing up in the Google image search results.

A validated XHTML file doesn’t necessarily mean its structure is correct. Make sure each page has a different title and make sure that the title is relevant to what that page displays. A proper header hierarchy is also a must (only 1 <h1> tag, following tags have to be h2 and subsections of that h3 etc).

Figure 3: Proper header hierarchy

Good formed links always improves the visitor experience and affects search engine spiders in a positive way. The same can be said for the URL’s to your pages. A lot of dynamic sites might use a URL structure such as http://www.example.com/index.php?pageid=8. Unfortunately this URL does not give the visitor any information on what he/she might find at this location. It is better to use user friendly URL’s such as http://www.example.com/what-we-do.php, where the URL clearly indicates what that page will be about. The trend is to replace any spaces in the URL name by dashes.

Ok, that’s it for today. In the next installment, we’ll be looking at how to get your pages indexed by the search engines and how to get your keywords right.