We were asked by the nice folks at the registered charity, Forward Scotland, who promote sustainable development in Scotland, to come round to their offices in Stirling to tell them a bit about search engine optimisation, why it was important, and what they needed to consider when they were crafting their new pages in their new Joomla CMS powered web site.In an enjoyable (at least for me) couple of hours we touched on the basics of how Google seems to work at any given point of time, usually rewarding good content, good website structure and quality incoming links from trusted sites.

We discussed that the aim of seo is to get Google (and Yahoo and MSN) to trust your site and rank it highly in the SERPS (search engine results pages), we also discussed how to build this trust ie get good quality incoming links and continually endeavour to add non spammy, 100% original content to the site.

We discussed synonyms, misspellings, plurals and meta-data.

We also touched on to rank well, you’ve got to tell Google what you want to rank for (yes, it’s really that simple).

They could do this by telling Google the phrases they want to rank for by;

  • crafting original, naturally written keyword targeted content per page that might prove relevant to a searcher, for instance, trying to learn more about, for instance, sustainable development in Scotland
  • with a nice keyword rich title with ‘sustainable development scotland‘
  • clean or search engine friendly urls (../sustainable-development-scotland/)
  • backed up by a good overall website structure that emphasises the global terms your ‘pushing’ for (you get the idea)
  • finished off with quality incoming anchor text rich links from other trusted and (where possible) relevant websites (about Sustainable Development, for instance) ;)

A little knowledge is dangerous thing sometimes and they expressed concern about PR Leak. I quickly pointed out there’s not an accurate measure of a sites PR anyway, as the Google Toolbar is out of date and manually edited these days, and that actually, perhaps it’s better to emphasise just how trusted a site yours is by actually utilising your link-out ‘profile’, because many respected seo think that who you link to matters.

We talked about things like Jim Boykin’s and his ideas of neighbourhood, citation and hubs.

I my summation, I guess it comes down to some simple premises;

  1. Trusted IBL Profile +
  2. Non-Spammy Slightly Optimized Content +
  3. Creative and Intelligent Internal Site Structure +
  4. Approved Outgoing Link Profile
  5. = Free Advertising In Google

Whoa? SEO is this easy? Well, yes, for their terms it should be.

SEO is as easy as running a marathon.

If you train up, get experienced, apply yourself, pace yourself, learn a bit about your competiton and go for it, you’ll get the rewards. Obsess about it and you might be even in with a chance of winning something.

Of course, it’ll take a lot of time, in preparation and actually doing - it’s hard work, just like a marathon (why some people bother hiring us).

At Forward Scotland, they’ve got the resources to do some of this in-house, with just a little direction from us.

I think in the end they wished I was a slightly shady seo with some shortcuts for them - but hey, I’m trying to promote sustainable roi and visibility via organic search, not quick fix shortcuts that might raise a flag in Google’s eyes and see them actually penalised in the rankings :) Black Hat is not for clients (not mine anyways).

Good luck Melvin and all the team at FS. Enjoyed it.

Forward Scotland

The guiding principle of sustainable development is to have development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable development recognises the interdependence of environmental, social and economic systems and promotes equality and justice through the empowerment of communities and promoting a sense of global citizenship. Forward Scotland

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