Search Engine Optimisation Tips from Eric Wolfram
SEO expert and tipster, Eric Wolfram, recently had an interview with Eddie Codell on the LunchMeet #52 Video PodCast and had the following to say about his tips and tricks for people looking to perform Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on their web site and get it ranked higher in Google:
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and why should people bother with it?
SEO is the the practice of making your web site optimal or relevant for a specific keyword or phrase, so that when people go to Google or search engines like Google you are hoping that your web site will come top of the search results for that phrase when they search.
How long has Eric been doing this?
In about 2000/2001 when Google first started making a splash in the world of Search Engines Eric wrote an article about how Google was going to save the internet and techniques for using Google, thus to improve the content of sites such that they were better optimized in general and at the same time for for Google and for it Spiders. As a result of this, people started finding the site and the article in question and of course asked him to perform SEO work for them.
What kind of clients does Eric take on? Does he do SEO work for anyone who comes along?
Eric provides a number of clearly defined packages and services, some of which he will provide to anyone, however, he has a policy of working specifically only for one long-term client in any given industry at a time. That's to say that if he is working on the SEO for a VoiceOver casting site and they are paying him monthly over a series of month or years, he will not take on work for a competing VoiceOver Casting web site. And so, at a very basic level Eric will provide SEO reports to clients of any number in any given industry, but for larger SEO work that pays month-to-month, as part of the service, he provides exclusivity for his SEO skills within that client's given industry.
What are the steps that Eric performs in his analysis?
You need to analyze what people are searching both in terms of keywords but also in the order of the words that people search with. People tend to start with a general phrase, but given the results they get, then they will narrow down the search with more specific terms, for example, they may start with "Robot" but then refine the search phrase further by using a term such as "Industrial Robot". This is something Eric does as part of an initial report, both analyzing the existing content of the site, and making recommendations to improve the site and how to implement this search engine optimisation guidance. The second stage of SEO is to implement recommendations and the third is to follow up on this by constantly monitoring and aadjusting the site accordingly.
How does Google rank pages and come up with the ordering of results?
Rankings are based not just on relevance but also on another factor called "Page Rank". Google will take the keyword desnity and times this by the page rank value, the page rank is an importance score. And so it will multiply the relavance by the importance. It is a base-8 or base-10 logarithmic scale (a 4 is 10 times stronger than a 3 and a 5 is 1000 times stronger thana 3 and a 6 100,000 times more important than a 3, so on and so forth), and so it doesn't matter how relevant your page is, if the page or the site is not considered to be important as a whole, the page will not figure so highly in the overall result set provided by Google.
How have optimization techniques changed over the last few years since you started?
We have moved on to the third generation of search engine optimization, Google actually tracks human behaviour now, both with tools such as the Google toolbar and services such as GMail to see who is clicking through to specific page links and sites. Relevance and specifically importance is judged on where people go, whether they bookmark a page and whether they return to the site or page again, and with email links, when emails are being marked as spam, links will become increasingly devalued as more and more email users mark an item.
What are some of the basic techniques of Search Engine Optimisation?
Making your page helpful is the way to cut the gordian knot of Google. If people like your site they will link to it, and then people will click through to the site and they will use it, perhaps repeatedly. The basics of SEO are the same thing as good useability and good architecture. Useability means, using titles, using alt tags and actually putting the keyword phrases within the site! This is all white hat search engine optimisation, being cool about it, labelling it right and actually using terms that people are searching for rather than what you think they are searching for. Use edgy writing and get backlinks, backlinks that also need to be relevant and contain the keyphrases in them. Within your own site Links such as "Order Here" or "About Us" are not the kinds of terms that people are actively searching for. This is why you need to consider the relevance of everything within thevisible and invisible content of the page.
External Links
Find the original VodCast over at Podtech: "LunchMeet: SEO with Eric Wolfram".
Eric's original article: "Score Higher in Google Search Engine (and why Google is saving the web.)".