What does Seach Engine Optimisation or SEO ? That's about being visible from the search engines. For instance, being on the top for a search of unasked but free brings this website on the top.

SEOMoz, one of the most active website on SEO, has published a report about what are the criterias the search engines use to gauge what pages should be at the top on any given search.

This report represent what is considered the most efficient by 72 experts. Let me try to summarise what it means for your strategy on the referencement.

get links

This is a no brainer. Read about pageRank to get the theory.

When you publish something, try to get links from external websites. When you stumble upon a page mentioning your organisation, check there is a link, if not, contact the website owner and kindly request them to ask a link, explaining it will allow their reader to get more information if so they wish. It doesn't have to be to your home page, the more relevant, the better.

Try to get some links for well trusted websites (eg. a big newpaper, the european commission...). The distance between your site and a big one is an important factor and a link from a site that has a high pageRank has logically much more weight than the one from a random unknown blog.

Also, the text of the link on their page is very important, it should be readable without the rest of the sentence, and still contain the most important keywords. Click here doesn't carry any useful meaning and the keywords click here are worthless for your traffic. I'd rather get a read this interesting article about seach engine optimisation

All this applies to external websites that link to a page, but it is also important for links from your own website.

Use a proper content management system and xhtml pages

Nothing you can do about it right now, but the tool you have should take care of putting the most important content at the right places, generate proper xhtml so the search engines can find and index best your content.

write titles with meaning

On the content management system I use, the title is used for the <title> and for the <h1>, that are the most important elements in your page. they are also used in the links automatically generated to the page, that is the most important element outside of your page as described above.

Think about the 3 keywords that are more important, be sure they are on the title (as a sentence, not a comma separated list).

What do you think is the best title for this page ?

• Search Engine optimisation: 5 useful tips
• Press release 2009/10
• Press release of the European <name of your organisation> steering committee has decided to autorize the publication on SEO

(and I can find real examples of much longer titles or introduction, unfortunately)

Write your content

Copy paste content from another press release, or from an external report, is not going to be good enough if you don't bring fresh and unique content. Duplicating existing content is a common trick by spammers, and google fights it, can and will ban your site if it considers that is only regurgitated content.

Moreover, that's much more likely that you will get links on original and well written content.

Avoid word/pdf

Unless your layout is really very important (eg. a publication), that's almost always better to convert the text into html and publish it as pages. Better indexed, and easier to apply all the stategies described in this document

Know what you want to achieve

You first need to know what are the keywords you want to be visible for. Make a list of topics, domains, expressions, industries you want to be near the top. That's better to target more specific sentences and have several, than targeting a highly competitive one (you will not be on the top of "sex" search, but I'm guessing it shouldn't matter).

Look at the search results to get ideas of the keywords that already work, beside the name of your organisation. See how it evolves over time. Time is the key here, you won't see a huge change in a few days, that's something you build for the long term, keep working on it, you will see progress over the months, but once you get good traffic, you will be likely to keep it.

Do to others what you'd want them to do to you

Go to your website, take the latest 3 articles that mention an external event, or external publication. Do you follow my advices ? Did you put links to this external content ? What is the text of these links ?

If this is a joint event or publication, go to their website and check that they have done it well with your website. Ask them to improve, give your page as an exemple, and feel free to send them this page, unasked, but free of charge ;)

To be continued...