Visibility in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN is the single most important hurdle for online business to overcome in generating relevant, high converting traffic to your site.Shine Marketing talk you through the basic principles of search optimisation, and offer a simple site audit to point you in the right direction…

Site performance in search engines depends on three core principles:

• Visibility - The ability of search engines to see deep into your site and read the content it contains.
• Relevance - How well the content of your site matches the user’s search queries.
• Popularity - How well your site is regarded by other sites across the web.

This short article talks you through each of these dimensions in turn and offers some guidance on setting strategies in place to acheive high scores for all three.Indexabilitymeans how easily your site is indexed by search engine spiders down to individual category and product level. This means all the visible information such as page titles, headers, image names, links and body copy. Critical benchmarks include:

• the site’s coverage in the major search engines
• the indexability of a site’s URL’s
• the site’s approach to managing search engine robots

Relevancemeans focusing these elements so that all they are all heading in a similar direction, reinforcing and developing central concepts (keywords) in an elegant, organic fashion. Critical benchmarks include:

• keyword strategy
• performance of site vis-� -vis its generic keywords
• deployment of keywords in important site elements (e.g. page title, description etc)
• technical implementation of these elements
• performance of site vis-� -vis its products and product categories

Popularityis fundamentally about the number and importance of organic links to your site: the greater the link popularity, the higher your results. Critical benchmarks include:

• competition, saturation and demand for the type of products in the search engines
• number of links and references to the site (which ultimately determine its ranking)
• deployment of keywords in important site elements (e.g. page title, description etc)
• the site’s presence in important directory listings
• the listings’ co-relation to keyword strategy

RecommendationsWhere appropriate, general and specific recommendations will be made. The nature of recommendations will depend on where any particular shortfalls or opportunities lie, but they may cover aspects ranging from site content to site architecture or ‘external’ concerns such as link popularity.

Overall, the SEO Audit will provide with an important understanding of the “gap” between you and your competitors and give you the insight to start addressing ways of making sure that your brand, product range and individual products perform better in search engines, generating you qualified site visitors and life-time customers. The SEO Audit costs £245. To request an SEO Audit, please use our contact page