SEO. Search Engine Optimisation. Do Not Be Frightened.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation can conjour images of the black arts and voodoo medicine, I have previously said SEO is Easy, in a kind of Hitchhikers Guide / Don’t Panic way.
Hopefully I can be a little more constructive here and give some pointers on how to get majour Search Engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask et al to notice and rank your site in a more positive light.
SEO from a proper Search Engine Optimisation company should never be ignored as a possibility but for many hobbiests and low turnover companies it can be an expensive excersice. Try some of the below SEO tips and hopefully you can get your site attracting the Search Engine bots and making a shave more money so you can afford professional SEO.
Step 1: Do Your Homework (Keyword Research)
The keywords you think your customers would type in to search for your products or services are not always what they do use? A keyword or more precicly key phrases should be investigated with a fresh view.
Make a list of 20-30 keywords or phrases you believe your users might use, or ones that seem prominant onn your competitions websites.
Group them into sections or categories that can be directly reflect to pages on your site. Take the words / phrases and plug them into the google keyword tool. Copy the (popular) words into a text file or spreadsheet tab, save and name related to the appropriate section / page on your site.
You should build up a library of popular keywords and now you are ready to look at your current website content
Step 2: Web Copy
Web copy refers to all the words or text on your website. Because content is king in the world of search engines, your keyword phrases you have listed on step 1 need to be placed strategically on your webpage to convince those search engines that your content is highly relevant to those keywords. Repeat a couple of times but make sure the end text is READABLE to a human
Tips of best places to use your chosen keywords
• Page title, both the TITLE tag and the H1 page headings
• If you can the URL of the page, can you see SEO mentioned in your URL bar above?
• Keywords Phrases and Key messages should occour more at the top of the page. Helps with both SEO and generating interest with users.
• STRONG Bold or EM italicise your chosen phrases
Remember, you are doing this for all key pages, start at the index page, and work out.Search Engine Optinisation is about ALL pages not just your default.
It’s also good to bear in mind that search engines can only read text, not pictures. Often web developers embed words in images to look better for website visitors or use Flash for animation, but this is a major impediment to search engines.
Step 3: Links. Aka Off Site SEO
Relevant links from relevant external (not your) web pages are as key as the content.
Hundreds of directories are out there and it is often simple to get links back from these, but relevant links are best. These should be thought of first. Industry specific directories can be good, but link exchanges with relevant sites may be good.
If you sell blue widgets only and you know another website selling red widgets only a link swap might be hugely beneficial. If someone sells the same thing as you you might want to rethink asking for a link exchange as it might be a conflict of interests for both parties.
List the websites and contact details for all likely candidates for a link swap. Put a link to them on your website then ask politly for a link back.
Keep An Eye On What Happens
Make sure you are using a statistics program to collect data about who if visiting your site, how they are using it, where they came from (site link, search engine etc) and what keywords they used if visiting from a search engine.
React to this. Keep a log, when you make a major change see if visits improve compared to the same page in the last few months, be wary of seasonal products though as there may be seasonal variation, expect a christmas tree sales page to drop traffic in January, if there has been a change work out why, what have you changed? What may have changed? Is this a seasonal product?
A package like the excelent and FREE Google Analytics can tell you all this.
Remember, make a change, see what it changes, if for the better keep the change, if not roll back to a previous version of the page.
I used to sit next to the “search team” when I worked at a large commercial site.
I remember being excited at the prospect of learning all the “tricks of the trade” but was disappointed to find out there wasn’t really much to it.
Like you say, it is kinda easy really. Even with a reputation for secrecy Google continues to put out lots of information in their blogs. And then there are dozens of sites that assimilate all of that and present what you need to know.
I guess applying it is the hard bit but once you get used to paying attention to these details it becomes second nature.
Sad to say that the “search team” I used to work with is no longer employed - the devs build on-site stuff into the site as they go, the copywriters are much more aware of this stuff and the PR team ensure the site is always being talked about.
Comment by Blogercise | March 28, 2010