Your Search Engine Profile

SEO (Optimising your site for search engines) is a balancing act and its becoming much clearer to more and more SEO professionals that this balancing act can be a very delicate one when looking at activities needed to help a webpage move up the rankings; and these activities go towards developing a Search Engine Profile for a particular page or site.

There are numerous factors that you can spend your time on, some of the more basic ones being:

On Site Factors

• Is the HTML coding clean and correct?
• Can search engines easily see all of your webpages within a couple of ’clicks’?
• Is your navigational structure working in favour of visitors and search engines?
• Are all your internal pages linked to from other internal pages?
• Do you have a good robot.txt file on your site?
• Etc etc

Off Site Factors

• Are you Followed and Liked on key social media channels?
• Is your site mentioned often on social channels?
• Do you have a good number of backlinks to your site?
• Are ALL backlinks of a good quality?

Do too much of one element and not enough of another (i.e. too much time with social media without building fresh new content on your site) and you’ll find it difficult to rank well, you need a good blend of a number of different factors (social, on site elements and quality link building etc).

But to what degree you do each of these (your Search Engine Profile) differs from sector to sector and website to website, the important element is to work out what your key competitors are doing and what their likely Search Engine Profile is, then attempt to get somewhere close to that.

It is unfortunately a long, manual job, but it’s a job worth doing and will pay you dividends in the long term.