Marketing | Plain and simple guide to search engine optimisation

By Anna Malczyk

If you are interested in this topic, take a look at our University of Cape Town Internet Marketing course.

If you’ve read anything about internet marketing, you’ve probably encountered the term “search engine optimisation”, or SEO. What is it, and how do you use it? Here’s a quick guide to getting started with SEO.

How search engines work
Search engines are tools that search through all online content, index pages, find specific keywords and return a list of results based on the search criteria of the user. Search engines need to come up with a good way of organising search results, so that the most relevant pages come up first. One of the ways they do this is by scanning a website for keywords and phrases and analysing where they are on the page. They also look at how many other websites link to your page – a good indicator of useful and quality information, relevancy of your domain name, the structure of content on your website and whether you have included meta information.

Keywords
Each search engine has a specific algorithm it uses to calculate the ranking of a keyword. The search engine evaluates how often the searched-for phrase appears in your text, and where it appears – words in headings, subheadings and first paragraphs all rank higher than those further down. To make the most of keywords, you should decide on one primary and up to three secondary keywords or phrases – these must be related to the content of your article, blog post or website page. Try doing a few web searches and see what phrases bring up pages and articles similar to yours. Use the primary keyword five to seven times throughout your written material, making sure it appears in the heading, near the top and in subheadings throughout. Your secondary phrases or words should appear at least thrice and should also be grouped near the top of the page if possible.

Metadata
Metadata is essentially data about data – it includes the title, description and keywords of a page are hidden in the code to help search engines find content more easily. Your website-building tool should have a section for inserting metadata, or speak to your web developer if you need help adding it. The metadata should correspond to your keywords and phrases above. Make sure that they are directly relevant to your content and do not to include too many for each page, as the search engine will penalise you for excessive and unrelated metadata. Because of possible abuse by some website creators, Google doesn’t rate metadata as highly as other factors.

Domain name
A domain name is the address for your website. The ending (e.g. com or co.za) tells the search engine in which country the address is listed. For the purpose of SEO, the more relevant the domain name is to the search criteria, the more easily a search engine will find it. One of the biggest factors in working out search ranking is whether the search term appears in the domain name. Having a relevant, easy-to-remember and obvious domain name can go a long way to promoting your website, and it is surprisingly easy and affordable to get the name you want. A service like Yola  will allow you to register your chosen domain for less than R150 per year, or you can ask your current website hosting company for advice. Choose a name that is either your company’s name (www.joesplumbing.com) or that reflects your company’s main service or offering (www.24hourplumbing.com).

Referral links
The search engine checks how many other, external websites have links that lead to your page. The more of these referral links that you have, the better your ranking will be. The best way to get links to your page is, quite simply, to visit and link to other people’s pages. Participate in industry-specific forums and blogs, and get your name known by providing useful content that is easy to link to and share using social platforms. Promote your company through relevant social networks and let others share your links and content far and wide. The more people who link directly to your page, the higher your search engine ranking will be.

Are you optimising your website?

Anna Malczyk is the communications executive at GetSmarter. Click here to learn more about the University of Cape Town Internet Marketing course.

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