With the SERPs (search engine results pages) being the new High Street - you didn't think it would be easy to achieve height in the rankings did you? Settle your mind - the easy days are gone - they weren't much good anyway. Only geeks bought from the web a few years ago. Now it's essential to be on the web for most companies because only now is when people buy services and goods through the medium. See TurnerDow for the full 27 methods to optimise your company in it's online incarnation, covering PPC, SEM and SEO. Most of these are cyberspace common sense, not doing them will incur potential penalties. Assuming these are all OK - here is the holy trinity of search engine optimisation.
The Father. Title Tags
This is the easy one - though completing it should be preceded by signifcant pondering. It's promotional but you need to make it nice for search engines too. It's the heading that will appear in the SERPs when your site gets returned in it's listings. Work hard on it. Look at how succesful sites (those returned highly for phrases you'd also like to be returned highly for) use the tag noting the anatomy. Just a few words, but an essential part of the seo success trinity.
The Son. Make a Great Site
If you build it they'll come. Take xe.com the currency conversion site. It's one of the most popular sites in the world. YouTube, Alibaba, MySpace, About and many more. These sites are places people want to come, they don't need links but get them anyway. If you have yet another laptop sales site, you have your work cut out - but if you have figured out a way for people to get cheaper diesel for their cars, are you going to need to request links? Nope. Somewhere in between these extremes is your site. Realistically it isn't likely to be in either category - but be sure to make your site fully featured but intuitive, simple but useful, a good visitor experience - and your work of getting back links is much easier. If the site is one of many cookie-cutter sites, well, why should anyone link to it? What's the point? But if they get there and they see something others would like to see - something they enjoy - they'll link in time, even if you have to request it. Natural links will come too, something the search engines will see and like.
The Holy Ghost. External Links
You saw this one coming huh? You were hoping there was some way around gettng backlinks, but knew in your heart that it had to be there. One could almost invoke the estate agents mantra: Location, Location, Location, replacing it of course with Backlinks, Backlinks, Backlinks. But the other two points of the sacred triangle have to be present too. Getting backlinks is the webmasters curse. It's so effective because it's so difficult - the search engines know that other sites get link requests continually and unless there is some reason not to, junk them. Carry out the second in this list well and the task will be much easier. If your site is good, they will link. Well allright - with a little encouragement from you. How to get links? Locate the right sites, request a link (not reciprocal) after a little flattery of their work, and provide the html for their ease. Be respectful but not pleading. Be brief but not curt. Expect no more than 5% success rate. It's the holy grail of the holy trinity - the bit that everyone hates doing, but the part that is the most essential of the three.
Work on your title tags, get inbound links, make a useful, enjoyable site to get success in your SEO. That's the SEO Holy Trinity. Now to work!
By Baron Turner of TurnerDow. Search Engine Optimisation, SEM, SEO for the online High Street. SEO Services for the long term.
