If you’re looking into SEO for the first time, it can appear to be some kind of mystical hybrid of rocket science and magic. There are a number of buzzwords which are often liberally thrown around: PageRank, backlinks, keyword density – but what do they all mean?

Search Term – The words which a person searching the web puts into the search engine. So if a user is looking for someone to redesign their company’s website they might cast their net wide and put in ‘website design’ or ‘web design’ or they might be slightly more speficic with ‘corporate web design’, or they might prefer to go local and type in ‘website design dorset’.

Keywords – The website equivalent of a search term. So if you think your customers are going to be searching for ‘corporate website design’ you would list ‘corporate website design’ as a keyword on your website. You’d need to think about all the search terms which people might put in if they were looking for your specific products or service, so you’d also list various permutations, like ‘corporate web design’ ‘corporate site design’ ‘professional website design’ etc. You might even include mis-spellings if you think that words will be frequently mis-spelled in the searches (“corporate webstie desing”?).

Page optimisation – This is the practice of ensuring that the page looks important to a search engine for your particular keywords. Meta-data, image titles, link text , urls …. and also vitally the copy itself (sometimes overlooked). Search engines rank some elements as being more important than others, so having your keywords in your content is better than just in your meta data, and having the keywords in the title of the page and the content is better still.

Keyword density – The ratio of keywords to total number of words appearing on the page. Almost all the search engines pay attention to the number of times your keyword appears on your page: so the presence of keywords there convinces the search engines of the relevance of your page to the search term. More keyword densitey = more relevant, but only to a certain point. There is a good deal of debate on what constitutes the ideal keyword density, and a page too dense with keywords is regarded as ‘keyword spamming’.

Off page SEO – This refers to the tactics which can be applied outside of the site to improve its rankings: including keyword research, and getting other sites to link to yours (inbound or backlinks).

On-page SEO – This refers to the optimisation of your site itself to improve your search engine ranking: including adding the relevant keywords to all elements of the page, checking the file names and structure, the validity of the code etc.

PageRank – Technically this should be Google’s PageRankTM , often abbreviated to PR – it’s the algorithm (system) google uses to establish which pages are relevant to your search term, and it looks mainly at inbound links. Links are votes for your site’s relevance and some votes are more important than others. It’s all about the amount of links pointing to your site, the relevance of the sites they’re coming from to your site, the words used in the code of those links. A good page ranking indicates that your page has been voted for by lots of other sites that google considers important.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

The thing to note about a good page rank is that it’s not the only thing in play; and so it does not guarantee your page a high ranking for any given search term. Having a good page rank will help your site in the search engine rankings, but for any given keywords your page

So there you have it, a brief rundown of SEO terms. If you’re still unsure how to nudge your site towards the top of the rankings for corporate website design (or any other search terms, for that matter); get in touch, we’ll throw in a free site appraisal and SEO recommendations.

Search Engine Optimisation is all about getting your website to the top of the pile and beating your competitors at any cost, right? Not necessarily. We were recently asked by one of our clients to carry out Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) on their website so that they would be found at the top of the list in key search engines like Google and MSN. This is something we’re good at and we know a lot about so we confidently told our client all about the sort of strategies we would be implementing, mainly focussing on ensuring that there was plenty of keyword-rich textual content on the page. Now by keyword-rich, I don’t mean just writing big lists of keywords like: “… search engine optimisation, SEO, search engine optimization, search engine friendly, search promotion …” or whatever, I mean writing informative and useful content for your website visitors and ensuring that it has plenty of relevant keywords in it in a way that does not make the site difficult to read.

We duly warned our client that we would not use any “black hat” tactics (this involves doing anything which goes against the Google webmaster guidelines or appears in any way sneaky), since the penalties for getting caught breaking the rules can be severe. We also pointed out that you really can’t fool Google much these days and if you do somehow trick your way to the top, your success will be very short-lived. It’s only a matter of time before you’re found out.

So we were somewhat puzzled when our client showed us a competitor’s website that was blatantly using black hat methods and yet was doing very well in the search engine results with Google. The site in question was a landscaping company that had stuffed well over a thousand keywords into its page titles, and a similar number in the meta tags (special keyword and description code that some search engines read).

The official line is that page titles should be no more than around 120 characters long and that anything past that tends to be ignored. Well this site weighed in at over 10,000 characters and was filled with pretty much every town name in the UK. If that’s not spamming, I don’t know what is!

So now I had to explain to my client why we shouldn’t be doing the same thing for his website and getting one up on his competitor. There’s a very simple answer to this and that is that they may not have been caught yet, but they will get caught, and when they do, they’ll be removed entirely from Google and maybe the other search engines too, their website designers will have their website removed from Google (they used the same trick on their own website) and the web designers’ other clients might get removed as well.

Given that most people rely on search engine traffic for business on their website, it could easily destroy a company if they were blacklisted on Google, especially since it can take months or even years to get the blacklist removed once you’ve de-spammed your website.

To quote someone else’s explanation of the difference between black hat and white hat SEO, it is like driving to the bank with your black hat on and then robbing the joint and driving off. Sure you got the money but the police are on your tail and sooner or later you’re going to get caught and then you’re out of the picture for a long time. And meanwhile the good guy wearing his white hat wanders down to the ATM, gets some cash out completely legally and walks off whistling a merry tune. And tomorrow he’ll back for more.