I'm Back + Dan's quick guide to SEO

Sorry I haven’t posted for a while, it’s been a busy few months and it seems like now’s the time to get going again. So why haven’t I been posting? Well, first I fell out of the habit and then I started working as an intern for a small fundraising company called Giveacar, which has been very interesting, but has left with little spare time. This is in part because its 9-5 but mainly because I’ve been sleeping on friend’s sofas. Thank you James and Amy!

Now the key thing about an Internship is that it is a learning experience. If it isn’t then it’s a waste of time and exploitive. Some people argue that Internships are exploitative anyway, but that’s an argument for another time. In this post I intend to show off one aspect of what I’ve learned and maybe impress any future employer’s miraculously reading this post (hint, hint).

That aspect is the importance of SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Basically the ways of making sure that your website appears in one of the top spots on Google for any relevant searches. This is for an obvious reason, if your website comes up top of a search then it will get more people visiting it than its competitors and vice versa, if your competitors are higher than you then they are getting the customers.

For example with Giveacar we want to be number one when it comes to ‘donate my car’ at least when the searcher is in the UK. Now you may notice I’ve hyperlinked the search term just then. That’s because it’s an anchor text. This means that it is a phrase that I want Google or Yahoo or any other search engine to link with my website. This means it’s far more useful than just putting in the URL because it tells the search engine that these words are relevant to the site. Whereas putting in the URL increases the number of links to the site but then fail’s provide any context.

Now the thing I find really interesting is that because Google wants to provide it users with a useful search term it actively tries to prevent people just churning out hundreds of thousands of links to their site on hundreds of completely unrelated websites. This means that they have done two things. First they made sure that the algorithm they use to sort sites is secret. No point in having it if people can work out how to game it. The second thing they do is rate links. So a link from a site with authority, that is a site with a lot of people linking to it and treating it as a trusted resource, is a lot more valuable than one from a site without. Similarly if a lot of people are making deep links (links to webpages that aren’t you’re home page) to your site that’s better than just a lot of links. In fact many websites have ‘nofollow’ links, which means that Google just discounts them when it comes to ranking websites.

So in a nutshell the challenge of SEO is to get a lot of high quality links to a website. Of course these are often hard to get. So there are several different ways to generate links. The first and most basic of these is to make sure that your site actually has a lot of high quality content. Articles that people want to read, a good service and so on. If the content is good enough then people will link to you. Of course this should be one of your objectives already, after all who wants a crap website? This however is not enough on its own. There is no point having a great website if no-one knows that it is there!

So you need to create some links of your own one way is to submit article to article site such as www.articlepool.com. These sites only accept articles of a high enough quality to ensure that Google counts links in them towards its rankings. This means that submitting to them is a somewhat long and arduous process. In addition it can take several days or even weeks for your article to get approved.

A second approach is to try to get your website into directories. These can either be free or paid, and there is an extent to which you get what you pay for. But they are also a lot quicker and easier to get onto than article sites. So they are certainly worthwhile. A good source of these can be found at info.vilesilencer.com.

You can also use social media to encourage other people to link to you. Post links to your articles and services and if people like them they may link them on their own blogs and websites.

The most fun way I’ve found so far is Squidoo. This is similar to an article site combined with a social networking site. Using this site to write articles (called lenses) you can also rate other people’s articles, start and participate in debates and generally get your name out there. You can also link to your own site safe in the knowledge that it’s considered high quality. However Squidoo will delete any article that appears too much like spam, and possibly your account so be careful.

So that’s my quick(ish) guide to SEO. After Christmas I’m going to look to do a couple of articles, one considering the ethics of Internships and one on charity marketing. So if anyone has anything to say about this post or those, please do. It feels good to be back.