Optimize Me!

In order to improve your website in the sight of search engines your attention will be two-fold:

Optimisation on the page

It is rather unnerving to face the fact that a machine - not a person, is going to pass judgement on the quality of your website. The good news is that it is done with an algorithm which is the same for all so that at least we have no favourites.

In order to ascertain what your website is on about we rely on the concept of keywords. It is a phrase encapsulating your activity. How it is displayed and how many times it does will be the criteria to figure out how closely you are really part of that category.

The crawler will massage that information to rank your site. You can get a feel of how well you are doing with the SEO utility

Optimisation off the page

How can a blind, mindless computer find out how accurate is your call to fame for the keyword mentioned above? Simple - by just corroborating what others are saying about you on the web. Amazing - because that is one thing I have absolutely no control over.

A backlink is any link out there pointing back to you. Just like you pass traffic to other commonly related sites there must be some information about what you do or say together with a link back to your domain.

How that happens is the dark art of web promotion and the search engines use the amount and relevance of links aiming back to you as an indicator to differentiate between you and your competitors.

It is not only the quantity of links out there which is being added to calculate your page ranking - it is also the text within the link. This gives the algorithm an insight about the keywords you really belong to as opposed to what you say about yourself on your website. If many pages out there fail to match your domain with a given keyword then your claim to that keyword on your own site takes a hit.

Another ingredient is the crowd your backlinks come from. If you are an investment consultant and your backlinks come from pages also loaded with hordes of massage parlours or dieting propositions (in a nutshell totally irrelevant activities) then the weight of those backlinks is discounted because it is plain to see that they did not come from wholesome promotional activity but from a conspicuous attempt to stuff (or worse purchase) links in a hurry.