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Search Engine Optimisation the Manual Way - Including Social Networking Best Practices

Many companies offer to give you a guaranteed front page ranking on Google and other search engines. Some simply accept a payment and use those funds to finance a Pay-per-click advertising campaign, which you could do yourself with the aid of Google ad words, Google analytics and various other tools offered by Google and other search engines. Still more will claim to give you a first page organic (not paid-for) link at a cost.

There are legitimate businesses which do deliver what they promise but there are also operators to be avoided and in any case, with an investment of time, SEO can be achieved without the need to out-source to a third party. This article explains how to do this.

Firstly, search engines and the most predominant of those is of course Google. To understand how to optimise a website for recognition by Google requires an understanding of their model and criteria.

Google send out "spiders" or "bots" to trawl websites. These are simply programs which search the Internet for relevant content and "live", constantly changing and evolving websites. Relevance and evolution are important to Google and in turn, to the website which you wish Google's spiders and bots to notice.

So, make your website relevant to your market and offering: use keywords. Research keywords via Google analytics to see how often they are searched for. Don't pile in with the majority though: choose "key phrases" which are nearer to identifying you and which people willl more specifically search for.

Let's say you manufacture "red objects": use that search term and Google will return millions of results, so we need to refine. Where are you based? What material is your red object made from? And so on. Once you've refined, search for, say "red balloons": still quite a large number of people searching for said product, so make it geographical. "red balloons in Wiltshire" will narrow the number of searches carried out and increase your chances of catching those same searches.

You could finance a Pay-per-click ad words campaign on that specific search, or you could simply optimise your website to attract more hits. Here are some tips on how to do that:

Use your chosen, specific and targeted key words frequently on your website to increase your site's relevance to that product: Google will recognise this and place your site higher in its search results. Don't use too many keywords or meta-tags as Google frowns upon what it now views as keyword "spamming".

URLs are useful and important, if relevant. Instead of calling a web page simply "about us", use the page title to describe what you do: instead of say, "redballoons" consider "red-balloons-in-wiltshire" as the unique part of your url.

Also, meta titles - the text which you see before the browser name in your browser window - are important and recognised by search engines as relevant: consider entitling each page.

Backlinks are important for SEO: the more backlinks which a website has, the more relevant search engines consider it. At the most basic level, the more pages which a website has linking back to its home page, the more backlinks there are. So add pages to your site: FAQ, About Us, Products, Services and so on: the more "branch" pages a site has, the more backlinks there are by default.

Another way to create backlinks and increase the relevance of a website is to sign up to online directories. Some request that the linking be mutual but not all and those that do merely add credibility to your site because they have "chosen" to list you, as far as your customers are concerned.

Keep your website regularly updated with a news page or blog, or both: a constantly updated or evolving website is looked upon favourably by Google as being relevant. In the same vein, add and amend pages so that when the bots or spiders crawl, they see updated content and report it back, increasing your relevance. Link back to your main site with blogs on Wordpress, blogger and so on and report updates to your blog on your main site and via social networking tools, such as Fecabook and Twitter.

Onto social networking then: Facebook and Twitter are the best known tools but there are others. Join them all (StumbledUpon, Digg etc.) They will all increase your site's visibility. Some tips on the main two though:

Create a Facebook account for your company and a group. Every time you create a news article or blog entry, post on your company Facebook page, invite people to join your group and regularly update that group's members on updates. Send direct messages to those members and post on your wall. Join Facebook groups and do the same: it may take a while but it will work.

Twitter: follow people or organisations whom you consider relevant to your business. They will invariably reciprocate. Set your Twitter account to automatically follow those who follow you. Set an auto-respond message within your twitter account which gets "Tweeted" automatically to new followers.

When Tweeting, don't just Tweet about your company and its offerings: Tweet about relevant or even random things. People look for interesting things and follow those who are most interesting. A good tip is to Tweet "streams" of local or relevant information, with a final Tweet about your company: hook them with interesting stuff before delivering your message. Vary your subject matter, as Twitter viewers have "watch words": they'll get an alert that a word has been used and then follow the Tweeter who used that key phrase.

Tweet about current events, as Google has a live news feed on current affairs which takes feeds from Twitter. If you Tweet often enough, Google will view you as a source.

As well as mass-media social networks, join the more "professional" ones such as LinkedIn: this allows for making contacts beyond the purely social sites. LinkedIn will allow Twitter updates for example to be propagated through their network and your profile.

Finally, write learned articles for professional websites which your peers may seek advice from: if you yourself are an expert in your field, you and your organisation will gain gravitas from having contributed to the online business community. Search engines will recognise these contributions too.

Social networking for business and Search Engine Optimisation can easily be an out-sourced operation but hopefully, this article will present some ideas on how to retain an in-house process. Until that function becomes a full-time concern, why employ someone else?

The author of this article is Founder and CEO of London Print Brokers and is responsible for SEO and online marketing strategy. We have successfully implemented all of the above and have gained additional sales and an improved Google ranking as a result.

London Print Brokers are a Business Process Out-sourced complete print procurement solution. London Print Brokers act as an out-sourced sales solution to trade-only suppliers. Those suppliers maintain low overheads by - among other means - not employing dedicated sales staff of their own: they out-source sales on a part-time basis to London Print Brokers. London Print Brokers then represent a "collective" of printers, who together offer a complete print solution.

Traditionally, print buyers would buy - for example - business cards from one supplier, brochures from another and large-format graphics from yet another. To free up their customers' resources and save them having to shop around, London Print Brokers do it for them: all in one place. As well as providing a one-stop managed print solution, London Print Brokers' customers use them for many other things:

A complex project, which would normally involve several suppliers with different areas of expertise for printing, for example: customers can free up their resources to concentrate on that project and out-source the printing to London Print Brokers. If a customer is exhibiting at a show or fair, they can concentrate on the logistics and leave the printing of business cards, exhibition graphics and stands, leaflets and flyers to London Print Brokers.

The print industry is so varied and diverse that no individual print company could hope to serve the entire market competitively. They'd have down time on their presses and so on. London Print Brokers have taken a number of trade-only print companies, with diverse equipment able to serve the whole market, packaged it up and brought it to the market as a one-stop, managed print solution.