I have picked up an enormous amount of knowledge about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) from the work I have done on this site in the last few months. It is an ongoing process of trial and error. There is no unique formula which will propel your site to the top of the search results overnight, but a combination of techniques gets you a better fighting chance. I am not saying I am an expert at this game, as I still have a lot to learn, but I am willing to share what I have found so far. The reason for this is there are sites which offer to do this stuff for you at a cost, and like anything else, the more you can do yourself, the less dependent you are on other people to do it for you. I do not mind paying money to get from A to B quicker, but once I have the insider knowledge, I prefer to take it back in house to reduce the dependency on others and increase my own knowledge. Hey, the journey is twice as fun as the destination, right ?

I will list here the items which I have found to work/not work for me. You might want to use them as some kind of starting point for your own SEO work. The important thing is to continually update your site and deliver relevant, focused contents. The litmus test of how relevant your site is can be measured by answering this question: "If I were a human visitor, is this site offering me the information I was looking for ?". Surprisingly, today's search engines are sophisticated enough to arrive at more or less the same answer to the human equivalent.

1. Make the Adsense colours blend in with your site

   A lot of people have offered this tip that in order to get more clicks on your Adsense ads (Adsense is the mechanism in which you can monetise your site, in that Google will pay you when visitors to your site click on the Ads served up by Google), you should blend the ads into your site as much as you can. I found this made very little difference to the click through rate. Visitors can somehow pick out these hotspots, no matter how well camouflaged they are. In fact, they seem to avoid clicking on these like plague, even though it costs them nothing to do so. I think it might be something psychological. I seem to get more success with the context searches delivered directly by the search engines, and these types of visits seem to be drawn more to the ads which stand out from the rest of the page

2. Google Adwords or Yahoo/Microsoft Overture ?

   Google Adwords and Overture are services which you can use to bid for certain keywords to drive traffic to your site. I signed up with both but ended up going with Adwords for the following reasons:

   1. Adwords is cheaper. You get more clicks for your money than with Overture
   2. Adwords minimum cost per click is 1p, whereas Oveture's is 10p. Granted, 1p will not get your ads clicked on very often, but at the other end of the spectrum, 10 visitors delivered to your site by Overture will cost you £1, making it much less cost effective. The balance is probably somewhere between the two. Adwords also has this mechanism where you can specify the maximum you will ever be prepared to pay for a click, but automatically adjusts the amount depending on your budget and what your competitors are bidding, and I found this mechanism consistently got me more clicks than Overture for the same budget
   3. Adwords does not incur a minimum charge, Overture charges you the minimum even when your keywords do not generate enough impressions (the number of times a visitor hits your landing page). This is to me ridiculous, as they are charging me even if they are not providing the service ? Go figure !
   4. You can verify the impressions in your log file with Adwords. I can not do the same for Overture. What this means is you have to take Overture's words that the clicks they delivered are quality clicks, or that they happened at all
   5. Overture's website is painfully slow compared to Adwords
   6. You get automatic editorial approval for your keywords with Adwords, Overture's approval process can take up to 2/3 days, specially if you submit them over the weekend

    

3. You do not get better placement simply because you pay more

   I wondered for a while why my website did not get the traffic from Google Adword, even though I raised the bidding amounts for the selected keywords. Then suddenly, my site got the increased traffic (although this coincided with the fact that I was improving it over this period), and this seems to be related to the fact that the landing page now has a higher PageRank number. So it seems Google is concerned about the quality of the sponsored products, and will deliver more traffic only if your site deserves it

4. The title tag is very important

   Most SEO techniques will mention META tags and what you should put in them. Different search engines put different emphasis on these tags, but they all seem to give a lot of weighting on the title tag. The added benefit of having sensibly named title tag is if your site has a search facility, it will allow for the easier visual identification of pages which match the search phrase

5. Incoming links help, but they are not the only way to gain popularity

   I found that Google is the most sensitive to incoming links (the number of other websites making reference to your website, and how important they are), but higher placements are possible too in other search engines (and maybe Google too) by having a quality article alone, or by talking about something no one else talks about. I also discovered that the indexing algorithms vastly differ between search engines, so I have had ocassions where my articles list highly on one but not the other). It is a good idea to not rely solely on Google for traffic to your site, just in case they decide to blacklist you one day for doing something questionable (remember, there is no appeal system in place for where your entry appears in a Google search). So to hedge your bets, Yahoo! and MSN are two other perfectly good search engines to optimise for

6. Does the Google Sandbox really exist ?

   There is this theory that Google elevates your entry highly in the search results for a few days, then you just suddenly completely dissappear from the radar for months, only to re-appear at a later day, crawling slowly up the listing. This is known as the Google Sandbox effect. I have certainly seen this happen, but can not be too certain about it, as some of my entries seem to do quite well from day one and stay where they are in the listing. There seems to be some kind of correlation between the likelyhood of this and how high the PageRank of your site is (type PR checker into Google to discover the PageRank of your site). It seems that your article is more likely to stay where it is in the listing if your site is ranked highly

7. Do not refactor your site

   Refactoring is a process of rationalising your site as you go along. For example, let's say you knocked together your site overnight and called the pages foo1.html, foo2.html etc., then roll it out to the live environment. Later on, you decide to rename these pages into sensible names like Garmin_Etrex_Vista_Review.html after the search engines have crawled your site and indexed your pages, then you might lose your placement because of this. The moral of the story here is to spare a bit of time at the beginning to put together the sitemap for your site and name the pages as they should be, rather than waiting until later to do this. This is more applicable for the so-called 'Web 2.0' sites, which are highly interactive and more likely to require refactoring than sites containing static pages. The same goes for changing the name of your web server, so make sure you go for a good name when it comes to registering the new domain (Google treats sub-domains as separate sites, so make sure you nail this down as soon as possible before letting the crawlers in).

8. Promote your site manually

   Some company will offer to promote your site by adding it to hundreds of search engines with guaranteed placement etc. for a fixed fee. This technique, if you think about it, will only:

   1. get you the visitors, not keep them. Web surfers will not come back to a site which does not give them a reason to
   2. increase the traffic to your site momentarily. The traffic will stop once your subscription money runs out
   3. get you the traffic, but not necessarily relevant, quality traffic
   4. get you banned from search engines (if the techniques are a bit shady)

   I have found that with carefully selected targeted audience, you can also drive visitors to your site. Let's say if you have an article of a review for the latest GPS receiver, why not go to such a forum and let people know about the article on your server ? The people who click on the link are the ones more likely to be interested in your contents in the first place, and it is free (ok, you have to do some work for it, but it will get you quality traffic). Public Forums are the best medium for promoting your materials, but make sure you are not abusing it, as there is a question of your credibility if the information you are offering is not as advertised

9. Why pay for a SEO tool, if you can get Google Analytics for free ?

   I recently subscribed to Google Analytics, and the analysis and reports offered by this free tool is way better than most SEO tools I have played with. All you need to do is embed a little Javascript on the pages on your site targeted for data collection, and then come back to Google Analytics after a week. You will be amazed at the details and drilldowns available. You can even create marketing and SEO campaigns to check on their effectiveness. The coolest feature is the overlay of the hotspots on top of your website, so you can see what visitors are all clicking on once they hit your landing page

10. It is a good thing to have powerful connections

    Look at this site, and tell me if it has anything spectacular ? I visit it sometimes, but the articles there are not of any higher quality than elsewhere, the analysis and coverage of the topics is adequate, but nothing earth shattering. So why does it get a PageRank 8/10 from Google ? Well, if you look at its parent company, namely CNET.com, which owns new.com, zdnet.co.uk, and a few others. So sometimes, it is who you know, not what you know. Why is PageRank so important ? Well, the higher the number is, the more likely someone will pay you big money for either your site or your ad space

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