Last updated on March 31st, 2016 at 01:02 pm

Today I have spoken to two prospective clients who have both said that they thought that all that was involved in SEO was adding keyword meta tags so that their website would show in the search results.

In both cases I had to explain that Google does not use the keywords meta-tag as this post on the official Google blog shows and in fact I could remember in about 2005 when they announced that this was the case.  I later then noticed a tweet from someone saying that they had filled in their meta keywords and were not showing in the results and wanted to  know why.

Despite what you may read on many websites (which are either very out of date or deliberately misleading) search engine optimisation (SEO) involves an awful lot more than adding keywords to the code on the page.

In fact Google is on record as saying that there are over 200 factors that they consider when working out how well a single page on a website ranks for a search.  These include (in no particular order) :-

• The title
• The Meta description
• The age of the domain
• How often the page is changed
• How old the page is
• The page contents
  • Page headings
  • Number of times that the target phrase is repeated
  • Where the phrase is repeated
  • Links on the page (both internal and to external sites)
• The number of links to the page
• Where the links to the page come from
• The wording of the links to the page
• The age of the links
• The types of links
• How quickly the webpage loads
• Where your site is hosted

and many, many others.

While it is possible to SEO the pages on your own website you do need to be aware that there is a lot of misleading information out there, some of which is deliberate in my view and other of which is either old or not tested.  There are also a lot of SEO firms that will promise to get you to the top of the search engines and many of these will use a single method – for example by placing lots of comments in blogs or forums and hoping that some of this “spam” will slip though and be counted by the engines as a vote for your site, others will tell you that you are now in top place for your business name – but surely SEO is about getting people that have never heard of you but are looking for your products or services to visit your site, if they have heard of your business you shouldn’t really need SEO to get them to your website.

And finally…

One of the best resources of advice for good SEO, if you want to do it yourself, are the webmaster guidelines published by the major search engines such as these for Google and these for Bing.  Alternatively if you are a small business and want some help with your SEO please feel free to contact us for a free quote for SEO