An absolute beginner’s guide to SEO

So you want to increase traffic to your site. In the long run, as I am sure you are aware,
the cheapest way to achieve this is through the organic search results on Google, that is
the main results that are displayed along the left hand side of the screen, as opposed to
the paid ‘adwords’ results that appear along the top and right hand side of the screen.
I recently saw a very interesting study done on the eye movements of internet users as
they scan the Google results page for information. I have attached a link to this study
to the end of this article so you can see for yourself what a difference it makes to come
in the top 3 results, and if you can make it to the top position, the number one result,
and you can stay there above your competition, well then you probably won’t ever need to
pay for advertising again!

Let me tell you a little about myself. I run a magnotherapy company which sells magnetic
bracelets for help with arthritis, circulation problems and other pain relief. Not the
biggest market out there, but not without its competition. Now I know that our product is
probably the best one out there as it was developed by the inventor of the world’s only
clinically proven bracelet and the current model represents a significant improvement on
the old design, but it’s tough getting attention to our site because it has only been live
a couple of months. So what course of action is open to me?

After doing a lot of research into SEO, I can draw two main conclusions. Firstly that
there is no quick fix, and secondly that no-one really knows the best way of going about
it!
So what can we do? The first thing to do is learn and understand a little of the theory.
Google doesn’t really disclose how it works out the order with which it displays results,
and it changes the criteria all the time, so it is wise not to try and be too specific.
But the basic principle is this: the more links there are to your site the better it will
do, the higher quality those links are, the better it will do. So SEO is primarily about
link building.

But what constitutes a ‘quality’ link? This is largely based on Google’s ‘page rank’
system, where web pages are ranked from 0 to 10, 0 being the lowest and 10 being the
highest. The higher the page rank of the page that contains your link, the higher quality
the link. You should ensure you have something on your browser that can tell you the page
rank of the page you are on so you have an idea about how good the links you are building
are. There is one of these included in the Google toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
The first thing to look at is web directories. These are sites that organise a list of sites
into categories to make them easier to browse, although more often than not this is more of
a system just to allow people to gain more links to their site. Search Google for a list of
high ranking directories and apply to the higher ranking sites, but don’t forget to check
the page rank yourself as the data quickly changes as some lists will unfairly promote
their own sites.