It was so much simpler in the last century. SEO was all about your meta tags. Everybody knew about them - developers, clients, even Joe Public. They all knew that all you needed to do was hide some words in your page, and like the proverbial magic bullets, they'd hit the search engine bullseye. Then Google came along and moved the goalposts.
Actually, they did more than just move the goalposts. They became a noun. And a verb. And while undertaking this pincer movement on the world's languages, they also had the audacity to make meta keywords almost irrelevant (Joe Public has yet to fully catch on). These days, it's pretty much all about the words that your visitors can actually read.
Google has at least had the decency to inform* the world what these rewritten rules are. In late 2008 they gave us their Search Optimisation Guide PDF. Ironically, this disclosure didn't actually tell SEO professionals anything that they hadn't already guessed, or worked out for themselves. But coming from the horse's mouth, it carries some weight. And as all search engines work in a similar way these days, it's great general advice.
What Google's guide does make pretty clear, is that getting good results in their search engine involves a multi-pronged approach. So at the risk of vastly oversimplifying, getting the SERP results you want requires that there is some effort applied to...
- Presenting the content in the right way - this is primarily a development issue
- Presenting the right kind of content - this is primarily a deployment issue
First the development issue
Our website publishing system, the Lucid CMS, has been designed and built to fulfil each and every recommendation made for the correct presentation of your content. Whether that's providing full control over the key parts of the page, (like the title element or the meta description), or creating human friendly, super-optimised page URLs - websites built using the Lucid CMS are Weapons of Mass Search Domination.
Then the deployment issue
This is the part where it's really down to you, or somebody within your organisation. Google, users, and perhaps most importantly, other websites who might link to you, love good content. So unless you have a James Joyce or a F. Scott Fitzgerald on board with your project, you might need to use the services of a really great copy writer.
Understanding exactly what search engine robots are actually looking for is central to a successful SEO strategy. We can help you with keyword and competitor analysis, to ensure that you're giving Google what she needs so that she can return the love…
And finally, the chicken entrails
You didn't really think we were going to tell you where to bury them for free did you?