Search Engine Optimisation, it’s a term that all of us in some way or another, have become acclimatised to. Almost indoctrinated into our understanding of the world of the online beast. However, unlike a static object toward which we are moving and the picture getting ever clearer, SEO is like the stars above us. Travelling at lightspeed into an ever expanding universe with no sign of deceleration. In the same way that we look up at the night sky and see the light of stars that once existed but have since died in a spectacular supernova, our picture of SEO will not be an accurate representation of the “here and now”. So, do we keep up, or give up…?

Explaining the intricacies of Search Engine Optimisation tactics, moves and strategies is not the purpose of this article. If however, you’re looking to catch a glimpse of clarity from that star filled blackness that is SEO, stick with me. SEO has been fashionable for some time now. There are plenty out there who want to “sell it”, but do you know what they are selling? If you want to get yourself educated, so you can make better decisions about your Manufacturing Businesses online presence, this is the article for you. (Right now that is. Until it all changes again, then we’ll write another post...and so on…)

What is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO?

Let’s start with getting us all on the same page with the term Search Engine Optimisation. What is it? What’s it’s purpose? How does it impact your life?

All great questions about anything you’re even thinking about spending money on by the way!

The ultimate goal of SEO is to make sure your website is returned in the results for a given search by a given user. Further to that, you don’t just want to be returned, you want to “rank” well. Search Engines are the primary way people find websites. So if you don’t appear in the search results, you don’t get any visitors to your website. If they don’t visit, they can’t be turned into customers.

Search Engines, like Google, are trying to match their users requirements with data they’ve collected from all across the web. That means they take a small piece of information, a bunch of words from a searcher, and translate this into relevant, meaningful, useful results.

This formula sounds pretty simple. Let me assure you, it is not. Google, and the other major search engines (I know, who are they?!) use a tonne of different factors, including your location, search history, time of search etc. to establish your “Search Intent”. They then try and match this “Search Intent” with the “Content Purpose” of the web pages they have in their index.

So am I saying, without SEO you won’t appear in search results, you won’t get any website visitors and you won’t get any customers? No. Plainly, Google are too clever to let that happen. They WANT you to get found, if YOU have something the searcher is looking for. They look good when they return useful results, they look bad when they return useless results.

So what does SEO actually do?

Search engines are pretty clever things. They can read a page a way a human can’t, they can file that information in an infinitely huge filing system, and recall all of it at a moment’s notice. When you think of it like this, as a hugely complex filing system with infinite levels, and levels within levels on a 3D scale you realise there are things YOU can do to help.

That’s SEO. Search Engine Optimisation helps Google, Bing Yahoo and the rest “File” your information away more effectively. The more effectively it’s “Filed” the more effectively it can be “Recalled”. Let’s turn that on it’s head. If the search engines don’t really know exactly where to file you, it’s likely you’ll go into a “Broad category”. This means Google isn’t quite sure what you’re web page is about, the quality of it and the meaningfulness of it. If Google isn’t sure, you’re not going to “rank”.

The higher confidence Google has in the quality, the credibility and the subject matter of your web pages when it “files” your data, the more confidence it will have when returning that data for a searcher. SEO helps take away the ambiguity, it helps Google feel more confident about how to categorise and file your “data” or web pages.

Mind, Blown…

”SEO = Help Google with their mega complicated filing system”

There are a tonne of ways you can do this today, and in the past there were tonnes more. Which brings me on to the “Types of SEO” you’ll hear flooding your senses as you take in the tactics, tricks and tips you’ll find from all around the web.

Types of SEO you’ll hear about

Let’s cover the Good, the Bad and the Ugly!

White Hat SEO - The Good

The reference to “White Hat” is to signify that this type of SEO is free from sin. It’s “whiter than white”, or “in-the-clear”, it cannot be accused of less than honest. Sticking with our analogy of the expansive filing system that is the Google Index, White Hat SEO would be the equivalent of helping Google file your data in exactly the right places without taking any short cuts.

This is how search engines want you to behave. They don’t want you to trick their systems, they want you to represent yourself honestly and clearly. As a result, the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing reward those who follow the “White Hat” route with sustained ranking, whilst they punish those who don’t with down-ranking.

In today’s world of SEO, White Hat SEO is all about quality content, that solves problems, with high levels of credibility. There have been multiple articles in recent months professing that the world of content marketing is actually colliding, and increasingly becoming, the world of SEO. They are becoming “One and the same”. This is because the major search engines reward all the same practices you will see a great Content Marketing Strategy achieving; Good traffic, High Volumes of Social Sharing, Other data on the web using it as a reference (or a “backlink” in SEO talk).

The collision means the SEO companies of yesteryear or even yestermonth are not only lacking in knowledge, but they are lacking in the skills it now takes to actually optimise for search engines. Worse than that, practices of yesteryear are now not just simply less effective, they are actually damaging and discouraged by the Search Engines. Even some dated white hat practices have slipped into the realms of “Grey Hat” SEO.

White Hat SEO is the only way you can build sustainable rankings over time without opening yourself up to the liability of being down-ranked for less than perfectly honest practices, in the future.

Black Hat SEO - The bad

This is not devoid of skill. Understanding what you can get away with, how you can manipulate the system, how you can make it “look” like you’re helping google...This takes some real understanding of the major search engines. Beyond understanding, SEO’s who take this approach are gambling with your website’s long term credibility and value. Yes, Gambling! This is because, when Google refines their algorithm they are seeking to close these loopholes, punishing those who’ve tried to exploit them. The value of your website can go down the toilet overnight!

The likes of Google do major updates to their algorithms anywhere between 6-12 months apart, with refinements daily! So not only do SEO’s need to understand the loopholes, they need to be able to repair the problems they cause, quickly, if at all possible. This could get you into a predicament where you’re paying for an SEO to undo the work they’ve done, just to get back to where you were in the beginning!

You’ll hear words like; Link-farms, Keyword stuffing, Gateway Pages and Hidden Content when the subject of Black Hat SEO is being talked about. Some of these techniques are simply exploitations of very valid signals to the search engines about how to file your web pages. On the other hand, some techniques are just downright manipulative.

Black hat SEO takes a lot of knowledge, a taste for risk and a lot of cash to work. Truthfully, in the long term you will lose out. If you have SEO’s offering you anything like this, they have questionable ethics, so you may want to consider turning them away.

Grey Hat SEO - The Ugly

As I mentioned earlier, there are some techniques which WERE OK with the major search engines, but have since become ugly. These are the “Grey Hat” SEO techniques. The reason for the “slip” from white to grey is typically an enhancement in the Search Engine Algorithms. Algorithms are imperfect. Therefore, there are techniques that are technically legal, but ethically dubious.

Grey Hat techniques are a source of debate as there are a number of interpretations of guidelines provided by Google and the other search engines. Each SEO’s interpretation could be different. These ambiguous guidelines are where refinements to the algorithms take place, leaving some on the “White” side and others on the “Black” side.

Anyone who is trying to get their, or your website to rank will be performing activities which could arguably be “manipulative” or “unnatural”. The very act of “paying someone to get a website to rank better in search engines” is, arguably manipulative in itself. But let’s not get into an ethical debate!

Grey Hat techniques are at risk of damaging your website’s long term ranking performance. Overnight, manipulations can be identified in an algorithm update and bang, your site is punished and down-ranked. However, because the legality of these techniques is often down to interpretation, it’s difficult for Google to punish “manipulators” without punishing honest website owners.

On Page SEO

Each page of your website is constructed of many lines of code. It’s not like a word processed document, there are far more moving parts, with styles, tags, and all sorts of other data. All this data serves a purpose in allowing your web browser (like Chrome or Internet Explorer) “read” the page and display it to you correctly.

On Page SEO is the act of optimising the code on your web page for the search engines. So what does that mean? Well there are a number of ways you can help the search engines read and understand what your web page is about, and what value it would provide a visitor. Still a little vague? Well here’s a list of ways that an SEO, or your web developer can optimise your web pages.

• Optimised Page Titles
• Optimised Meta Descriptions
• Optimised Social Tags
• Proper URL Structures
• User Friendly Navigation (Breadcrumbs)
• Internal Links with optimised anchor text
• Text formating (using H1, H2, H3, P, Bold tags to indicate titles, subtitles, content)
• Image optimisation (Image titles, Alt tags, small sizes for quick page loading)
• Quick page loading speeds through lightweight code
• Great Quality, High Value content that solves problems
• High Quality External Links (no broken links, or links to poor quality sites)

You may have noticed I slipped in a word about content quality. Regardless of the code on the page, the written text on the web page is the most important factor. It’s the content, or written text that provides the most significant signals of what your web page is actually about. Believe it or not, Google has a number of ways it measures the quality of the content on your web pages. Measurements are based on the way it’s robots or crawlers read the page, and data it gathers from actual visitors to your website, how long they stay, what they click on etc.

So that’s a bunch of stuff you can do ON your website, but there are a whole bunch of things you can do without touching your website. That leads me on to…

Off Page SEO

So how do you optimise a website by not optimising the website? It’s all about signals. Search Engines look for signals of your website’s credibility, quality, popularity and general usefulness. In the online world these signals come in many forms of social proof. If someone links back to your website, that’s an indication that what you have to say on your web page is of value and worth reading. Further to that, the world of social media creates a digital footprint that acts as further proof to the major search engines that your website is worth paying attention to.

You’ll hear terms like link-building most often when talking about Off Page SEO. It’s not just down to the number of links that are pointing at your website, it’s also significantly about the quality. That isn’t even mentioning a whole load of other factors Google is measuring and considering when looking at a link to your website. So don’t go rushing out to build and share links with every tom, dick and harry. Be strategic, and have something of high quality to link to. Back to good old content, I said SEO and Content Marketing were becoming one and the same…

Local SEO

Worth a mention, but more appropriate for your brick and mortar local shop than a national or global business. You may or may not have noticed that Google, in particular, offers up different results depending on where you are in the country. You may also have noticed, that the style of the results returned can change quite dramatically.

Basically, Google senses when you are looking for a “Local Business or Services”, then it returns results for local businesses that fit with your search terms.

From a business perspective, it’s all about making sure you’ve claimed your business pages, optimised the business descriptions, images etc. within each search engine. For instance, in Google, you can claim your Google My Business page, and complete a Google+ Page. Alongside these activities, getting reviews on Google My Business and ensuring all of your business contact details are consistent across the web, in directories, on your site and other sites. This helps Google and the other search engines confirm that the information it’s returning is correct and accurate for the searcher.

Google isn’t fine tuned for the intricacies of an industry like Manufacturing, so local SEO isn’t of great concern. However, all the activities you would perform for local SEO are good general practices when doing any sort of SEO. It’s simply where you would start IF you had a local business, like a restaurant or a car garage.

Many types, but not mutually exclusive...

These types aren’t all mutually exclusive, SEO tactics can be both “White Hat” and focused on “Local Search”. The important thing to take away is that there is a difference, and what you choose to do and not to do will have consequences as described.

Conclusion

That’s a quick overview of SEO, what it’s aim is, and the types of SEO that can be used to achieve that aim. At the very least you are now 100% more informed about SEO. At the most, you’ve identified some key vocabulary and strategies that will allow you to make a more informed hiring decision if you’re choosing to hire an SEO.

3 Key Takeaways

• Black hat is bad, white hat is honest, grey hat is ugly.
• We should all be practicing honest, high quality On Page SEO as there is no excuse for bad code and bad content.
• Off Page SEO is less technical and more Marketing Management, but a key ingredient to the mix!

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