Update: @MattCutts posted an update video on Google+ and YouTube.

At it’s most basic level, SEO is about using certain techniques to enhance your search rankings (without making your site spammy). As my friend says, SEO is…

@andykinsey The equivalent of lingerie to search engines, makes sites much more attractive.. in most cases.

— South West Broadband (@SWBroadband) April 3, 2012

Well that is certainly how lots of website owners view the world of search optimisation. But in reality it’s less about looking good and more about being good.
It’s what is on the inside that counts.

SEO, as mentioned in the video above, is not about paying money to a search engine to rank highly. If anyone claims that or promises you a no #1 slot on Google or Bing – they are lying they are probably offering paid adverts (also mentioned in the video above).

But beyond the improvement of search rankings, what is SEO?

Well, to myself at least, SEO is about improving the quality of the website. But not for search engines and the magically algorithms they use, but instead for your users. After all, you can have as many visitors as you want to the site, but if it reads like a 2 year old has written each page or product description, or if your navigation makes no sense or generally your user feels lost then you will never see them a) return again or b) convert and become a customer.

So for me, SEO is the art of making a website beautiful on the inside and the outside for both users and search engines. If your website is built correctly, structured correctly and has great content it will naturally rank well and your conversion rate will also be much higher than if you just stick to “gaming the search”.

What are the key ingredients to great SEO?

There are many, more than 200, factors which search engines take into account for every single search. Some of those factors are more important than others, some are variant factors (they matter sometimes but not others), some are known and many are not known. In this series of posts I will guide you through various search factors and how you can use existing information and know-how to boost your rankings to gain more traffic. A few things which we will look at are:

• Your Website Code for SEO
  including: title tags, descriptions, alt tags and more 
• Your Design for SEO
  including: above the fold, advertising on site and user experience
• Social Media for SEO
  including: how to best utilise each type of social media
• and, Off-Site Link and Reputation Building for SEO
  pretty much does what it says on the tin.

But what I will not be doing is dwelling on Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is the name given to those who basically “game” search engines or build millions of links or generally spam. All search engines frown upon Black Hat techniques and whilst I know a fair few of them I will not be discussing them on this blog or in this series. If you want to know more about what BHSEO is take a read of this wikipedia article.

How to get the most from this SEO Guide.

To get the most of this guide to SEO you will need to in the first instance take the below actions. The actions below are useful in general but will be important for some parts of this guide as I will be referencing certain activities and you will need to have done the below.

1. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools
2. Install Google Analytics
3. Sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools
4. Submit your site to Google and Bing
5. Want us to include something in the SEO guide, tweet @andykinsey
6. Check back at SEOAndy.com each week.

Please, please can we please stop calling mobile web sites – designed for particular devices –’responsive web design’. They’re not.

— Mark Boulton (@markboulton) March 30, 2012

Mobile sites that are optimised for devices (native behaviours, tech etc) is something else. ‘RWD’ is responsive layouts. We need a new name

— Mark Boulton (@markboulton) March 30, 2012

Mark Boulton is a well respected web designer, author and speaker.

Primarily the conversation revolves around what Responsive Web Design (RWD) is and is not. But before we examine that let me explain the concept of RWD as simply as possible.

What is Responsive Web Design?

If you are old enough to remember the “browser wars” between Internet Explorer and Netscape you will know about styling issues across the browsers led to “best viewed in” … indeed some websites apparently still carry such messages. Eventually the web browsers hit upon standards, though not all the same standards, and has steadily progressed to todays modern browsers which are pretty decent. However, there are now mobile browsers, tablet devices, CRT monitors, widescreen monitors, projectors – all running different browsers and rendering engines, but they don’t all show the same code in the same way and they don’t all have the same functionality.

It is at this point that Responsive Web Design comes in to play. Responsive Web Design is not about making your website look 100% the same across devices, it’s not about making your website work the same across browsers and it’s not about creating a new website for each device.

Responsive web design is, however, a particular way of coding such that the website works well (if not perfectly) across all devices and browsers.

It will never be perfect and it will never work in all browsers, this is a natural limitation of the web and the modern world.

Explaining Responsive Web Design

RWD is important to the web because it means without needing a complete recoding for each device and browser, without needing a mobile app or a native interface the web can continue to work openly and freely.

RWD uses what are known as “media queries” to check things such as device width. From this information the site will change style accordingly. This does not mean the site will function differently but change appearance. For example SEOAndy is responsive, if you shrink your browser tab it will begin to change, view it on your mobile and your tablet device and its different again. The essence of the site remains but the style changes a little.

Such changes are usually things such as content area width, font-face usage, font size, image size, using a grid layout etc.

Another thing media queries can do, which is NOT, responsive web design (technically, though in reality for many is) is functionality and device checking. This means functions and styling can be changed based on the device and browser viewing it. For example choosing options on forms can be styled differently on each device and browser, but this is not RWD, this is simply device optimisation.

Device Optimisation means that the site would work without such changes, but looks nicer with those changes made.

Reading More About RWD

There is plenty around the web talking about this new web trend that is Responsive Web Design. A few great sources are: (@beep) Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design (a-book apart), a marketing land article, also a BBC Internet Blog article, also a @boagworld interview with Ethan Marcotte, an interview on the web ahead with Mark Boulton oh and don’t forget google is your friend – go on search “responsive web design“.

• It’s an Elevator Pitch
  Forget the 60 seconds you are used to in the lift, you’ve got 20 or 30 seconds (if you are really lucky) to pitch your idea, page and selling point. In that time you have about a tweet’s worth of content to explain everything, consider everything carefully – you’ve hours to figure out what will say in those few important seconds to make it perfect!
• Never Repeat a Description
  This is less about your mindset and more about search engines (and users of course). Basically neither like to see the same thing repeated, they like something unique and if it’s not unique they wont like you – as such you may not rank for those pages with the same description and users are less likely to click-through … meta descriptions (like page content) need to be unique.
  This is even more important in today’s post panda world.
• Don’t use HTML
  I can never make this point too much, whether its a hyphen (-), plus (+) or quotation mark (“) or any other not alphanumeric don’t use it. Search engines will throw it up as a HTML code most of the time, it will not use them as you wish for any rankings and depending on your character code (on site) you may encounter other issues. This warning is for all meta tags.
• Keyword Rich and Relevance
  No doubt you have a keyword strategy, for e-commerce sites it could just be brand names and category names (broad but can work) for others like this blog it’s more defined. Your meta tag should be keyword rich yet highly relevant and still pull your audience in. It is a sales pitch so don’t have 15 key words … it won’t rank it will look ugly and people won’t click it. One sentence, max 2 key words and a nice sell.
  Oh and check your spellings.
• Craft Your Meta Description
  Research what others would say about similar pages, do searches for the phrase you want to be found for, think about the 4 points above and craft your meta description. It’s not easy but with practice it will be quicker and you may not need to do 20 searches for what you want to be found for, usually your competition will be predictable – so think outside the box! If you copy what they say it won’t work… this is your sell and must be crafted to go with your content, a continuous tone is required.
• Iterate Your Carefully Crafted Description
  One thing people forget is that you can always update your meta tags. Google won’t always re-index them in a few days (like it may a new page) but it will eventually. So if you’ve a product page or 1000 of them update them on a regular basis. Meta tags can be living things, you just have to remember they are there and that these are the things which will get you an audience that will buy from you. Practice makes perfect.

If you enjoy the infographic do hit tweet and let the guys and girls at ROI Media know