The techniques available in search engine optimisation are myriad. Not only are there quite a few traditional techniques, experts are constantly developing their own. Your options for SEO can seem almost too broad at times. It is important to remember that all SEO techniques come down to three core areas: architecture, links and content.

Let’s go through these in the order that the search engines would encounter them.

1. Architecture

Your site’s architecture, or the way your pages are structured and linked together, has a massive effect on your relationship with the search engines. For a start, your site’s architecture can prevent your site from being crawled properly, if designed with the wrong things in mind. This can stop your site dead in the water, regardless of what you’ve done to the other two basic areas of SEO.

A good SEO consultant would be able to advise you on the things to avoid in your site’s architecture. A lot of sites run into problems because their site was designed long before they began to think of search engine optimisation. It’s never too late to optimise a site, but it’s important to remember that SEO may mean making big changes to your site’s structure. Things like the technology your site is designed in may need to be worked around or, in extreme cases, ripped out. This can be quite daunting, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about how to best cope with these kinds of changes.

2. Content

If there are no blocks for the search engines in your site’s architecture, content is their next stop. The content that should be optimised includes meta data as well as on-page content. This means that your keywords need to be included in areas that your site’s users won’t necessarily see, like the meta titles tag, although this can be used in the search engine results pages.

The number one mistake that businesses have always made when it comes to optimising content is putting in too many keywords. Keywords can seem like the miracle cure for a site with a bad ranking, but stuffing them into your content will only get you into trouble.

3. Links

Both internal and external links are important for your site. External links, or inbound links, are the ones most sites fight hard to get, as they weigh more heavily in the ranking calculation. Having other sites link to you is a way of telling the search engines that your site is popular and reliable. The reputation of the site providing the link is also important. Receiving a link from a high-ranking page is like having a powerful friend provide a reference rather than some bloke you met down the pub.

The important thing to keep in mind with links is the reputation of those linking to you, and the rules that the search engines lay down.

These three elements are at the very core of SEO. They may be basic, but knowing these fundamentals can help immensely with your site’s optimisation process.

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