With everyone, from the local corner shop, to big companies, optimising their web sites for search engines, it’s gotten to the stage where if you want to give your web site a chance of being “in the game”, you really need to have at least a basic understanding of search engine optimisation.
To be honest, it’s taken me a while to get to this point. I’ve always been very cynical about the field of search engine optimisation (SEO), which I’ve always associated with people who want to unfairly manipulate search engines – the so called “black hat” SEOs – for unearned personal gain.
For this reason I’ve avoided SEO, but I started to change my mind when I had an experience with one of my mainstream blogs that demonstrated quite clearly that a small change to your web page can increase traffic, and it’s not about cheating, it’s simple about making your pages as easy to find as possible. Here’s what happened.
WordPress (the open source content management system), by default, creates page titles that look like this:
Cogent Insights >> Blog Archive >>Book review: Get to the top on Google
However, when that page appears in a search engine, all people see is the first part of the page title, which isn’t actually very meaningful. By changing the page title to something like this:
Book review: Get to the top on Google – Cogent Insights
I was able to dramatically increase traffic. That’s not cheating, that’s just ensuring that my web pages appear in Google in a user friendly way. This made me realise that there might be other tweaks that I could do to make my sites more search friendly, I decided it was time to find out what SEO was really about, and that’s why I turned to Get to the top on Google by David Viney, who’s described as a “SEO expert”.
The 250 page book is well written and easy to read, though having some understanding of web page design and HTML does help. Viney explains what search engine optimisation is all about.
There’s not really that much too it. Basically you select some keywords you want to target, and then develop a web site that features those keywords, and then you get other web sites (preferably those well regarded by Google) to link to you. Of course, that sounds easy, but getting results in a competitive environment, can be very tough.
Viney also provides step-by-step instructions on:
- How to work out what key words to target
- How to set up your web site and pages
- Writing copy
- And how to get links to your site
In addition he also talks about how to avoid getting penalised by Google for inadvertently doing the wrong thing.
We’ve all heard of Google blacklisting sites for trying to cheat, so his discussion on this topic is very interesting.
In the last few chapters Viney talks about Adsense, Google Maps and Google Earth, and things like Google Analytics.
Overally, Viney’s done a very good job of explaining what SEO is about, and making it accessing in a no bullshit kind of way — he does make it clear that there is no easy way of getting to the top of a Google search enquiry.
If you are running a web site, than I certainly recommend Get to the top on Google as a very good introduction to the field of search engine optimisation.