P Mann

All ORCA websites are designed to be search engine friendly, however, below Steve Elles, our Operations Director, gives you some great advice about getting the basics right when it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO). 

Over 41million people in the UK are online. Over 70% of them have bought something online. (British Library Jan 2010).

With that level of opportunity you need to ensure that your website is fully optimised to the very highest standards, so that the search engines find it and place it at the top of their rankings.

[1]: What do you think is the most important aspect of a website’s design when it comes to search engine optimisation? Are there any hints and tips you could outline?
Depth, clarity and usability. A website must have a clear focus as to what the customer is going to achieve. I believe that Search Engine algorithms* are designed to think like human beings on behalf of human beings. Design your website with a human being in mind, drop the physics and get selling.
*an algorithm is a sequence of instructions used to make a calculation. It’s a computer program! In this case a program to decide where to list your website on a search engine.

[2]: There are thousands of companies that purport to offer search engine optimisation services. Can you offer any advice on what someone should look for when they are buying these services for the first time?
Results and a client list complete with genuine testimonials – if they’re any good, they’ll encourage you to contact their clients. Good SEO doesn’t happen overnight. It is a careful process that must be monitored and adjusted. Depending on your business you will need to decide what size of fishing net to use. Maybe you don’t need a big fishing net, maybe you need to practice fly fishing. Sorry for the fishing analogy but you get the point. There are many different strategies to be employed and you need the right tool for the job.

[3]: Meta tags and keywords are not the only things that the search engines spiders look at when they crawl a website. Can you talk about other aspects of a website that need to be optimised to ensure maximum exposure on Google and other search engines?
Much of this is speculation. Other than the people who write the algorithms no-one really knows. If you aim to build a “quality” website that a helpful Search Engine thinks, “Hey, these look like the kind of guys this person is looking for!”, then you are approaching the project correctly. Does your website leave any unanswered questions? Does your website offer the customer an exceptional online experience? Does the website hold the answers to potential Search Engine queries? What we do know about Search Engines is that they like websites to be accessible to everyone. Is the site Standards Compliant?  Make sure your website earns you brownie points. Customers do business with good quality websites and Search Engines know this.

[4]: Which popular myths for achieving search success can be exploded?
That it’s all about keywords. It’s not. Keywords are what Geeks write. SEO hails a new golden age of copywriting. SEO is more poetry than paint by numbers. Follow the same basic rules about marketing communication and you won’t go wrong gaining new customers. Luke Sullivan, a famous advertising copywriter said that as soon as you can formalise a successful piece of creative marketing then it is already out of date and therefore no longer effective. Good marketing is about understanding your target market’s current zeitgeist. That is more about art than science so keep updating your content and keep it fresh and interesting.

[5]: What are the key mistakes that beginners make when they are looking at search engine optimisation for their websites?
SEO has been this year’s buzz-phrase – thankfully finally overtaking “Blue Sky Thinking” and “Keep Me In The Loop”. We are noticing a long awaited polarity shift in a client’s marketing focus. Problem is, that the herd of business wildebeest have suddenly decided to stampede their eggs all into the SEO basket. SEO is not the Holy Grail of all future marketing. It is a part of the picture. It must form a part of the overall business marketing strategy. Seriously, if a small local retailer in a cluttered market expects to continue to run their business in the same way resulting in successful global sales when the local strategy has been resulting in declining sales for years, they are going to fail. SEO strategy may need to be focused on a hyper-local market place enabling the business to leverage stronger relationships from their traditional customer base. Everyone loves the David and Goliath story but let’s face it, David did some serious thinking before he took on the big fella… and he didn’t throw a can of Spam at him.

[6]: What do you think the future of search engine optimisation looks like? How can website owners prepare their websites for any coming changes in search engine optimisation?
I think that history will record SEO as a 20 – 30 year phase of intensive, intricate, time consuming and highly specialized marketing that echoed the heady heydays of advertising. Ultimately I think it is doomed. I look forward to artificial intelligence and the day a Search Engine truly understands the nature of your query. Conversely that may be the beginning of a nightmare… a Search Engine that’s never satisfied with your question and keeps asking for more details. I suspect that Search Engines will become more of a bespoke advertising medium, that bases its suggestions on your own intricate profile and what it knows about your personal taste and preferences – Amazon do this well with their “Recommended For You” feature. You will see far more of this in the future. Website owners can best prepare themselves for any future changes by ensuring that regular maintenance and adjusting of their websites becomes a daily part of their business strategy.