Search Engine Optimisation: The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Working in the Search marketing industry for the past 7 years I have come across a variety of opinions and methods of implementing optimisation for websites. To be honest there generally isn’t much difference between two good search engine optimisation people. The ideas, theories and opinions might differ, but the basics (The Good) are always the same.

The Good

What do I mean by basics?
To start off with all optimisation starts with a good and thorough keyword research campaign, followed by a full review of the website in question and then a list of on-page changes. On-page changes referring to content within the relevant tags as well as the body content of the pages. The technical aspects of the sites are reviewed and suggestions are made on navigation, linking structures and so forth. Then the more complex optimisation (The Bad) has to take place, unfortunately in today’s world the complex pieces are also the most influential in terms of impact

The Bad

What do I mean by complex?
Well, if it was that easy to explain it wouldn’t be complex! In essence for a site to be found and ranked in Google there needs to be a clear reason to the search engine, which I have to state is a robot, a machine without any feelings or any ability to make obvious connections, to rank one page above any other. One of the biggest factors in this is a ‘voting system’. The system is simply based on what other people, institutions and companies think of you, and this is picked up by Google via links into your site. Google view links coming into your site as votes of confidence, the more relevant a link is into your site, the better it is. Relevance is based on 2 main aspects, Why people are linking to the site and Who is linking to the site.

The Ugly

Why are people linking to your site?
If a website contains content on farming equipment and then has a link to a computer manufacturer’s website, Google will view this with scepticism, simply because there is no relation and will probably view this as low relevancy link. However if the same farming equipment website has a page dedicated to the computer equipment necessary to manage the farming equipment electronics, the link could be deemed as more relevant.  Hence the question, why are people linking to your site? If a page with relevant content links to the site, Google will see this as a relevant link and will mark this up in terms of trust. If Google views a link as less relevant, it will mark the link down.
Who is linking to the site?
The bigger the site, the more relevance it will pass along when it links. If a site the size of the BBC decides to link to you, Google knows that the link comes from a reputable site and it will automatically score the links from this site higher. Unfortunately in this instance an old saying of “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” comes into play. It is completely possible for a website with minimal optimisation to rank highly just because they have gained strong inbound links from big reputable websites.

The whole process as laid out is part of the Search Engine Optimisers remit. Everything has to be looked at, analysed and planned, simply because none of this is easy. From the very basic to the most complex a clear strategy has to be in place, what am I trying to achieve, how will I achieve this , who will I target, how will I target them. This only comes with experience, trial and error and a little bit of luck. But as Gary Player once said, “The more I practice, the luckier I get”