Search Engine Optimisation can be broken out into separate definable elements - however the main aim is to get more visitors to your website, be higher in the organic results, and gain more clients and customers.
Keyword Research
It is preferable that keyword research informs the theme of the site and the content, therefore it is better if it is completed before the site is live. However we do find ourselves working mostly on sites that are several years old. The lack of Keyword research can keep a website at the bottom of the search engine or done well can propel it to the top.
For example if someone was setting up an SEO company today and decided to target the one word SEO they would have 235,000,000 pages in Google to compete with. No matter what they did it would take several years to get into the first page results. However they could target the terms SEO company, SEO specialist, SEO consultant, or even better search engine optimisation consultant – all of these key phrases are still very competitive but much less so than SEO.
Searcher intent should also be considered. If someone is searching for SEO only, it is likely they are only at the beginning of their research; it has been proved that it is better to be at the top when they are ready to buy.
Keyword research will often bring many other terms into the mix that would not have been considered. Additionally many of these other terms may have less competition and or have more searchers.
Part of the keyword research is to provide an estimate of traffic numbers. There is no point in building a website and targeting keywords that have no traffic. There are various ways to predict traffic numbers using Google Trends, Google External Keyword Tool, Wordze, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, Microsoft Excel plugin – there are many SEO programs on the market to take your money. One of the best ways to estimate traffic is to run a pay per click campaign, this is covered in the PPC section.
Competition Research
Most companies have a very good idea what their competitors are doing offline. Listing these competitors and giving them to your search engine optimisation company is crucial. Your SEO consultant will also use your target keywords to discover who your competition is online – sometimes the two are different.
A lot of information can be gleaned from researching all your competitors’ websites. Who links to them? Are they using keywords? If so, what are they? Are they targeting markets you are not aware of? Are they advertising? Where is their traffic coming from? How much traffic are they getting?
And most importantly – How can you do it better?
Meta Tags
This is content that is not visible in the main browser window that the search engines still consider when ranking your website.
The title tag is the most important and most easily controlled element you have to work with on your website. The title tag is the small snippet of text that is displayed by the search engines in the search results pages. Every word used in this should be carefully considered and researched as it carries more search engine weigh than any other single element.
It is still possible to come across websites that start with “Welcome to…” – unless there are outstanding circumstances this is a waste and should be avoided. Your most competitive keywords should figure in the title tag and as close to the start as possible.
The most common major mistake still being practiced is using the same title on every page. Every page is different and therefore should have its own title – however they can also be used to help build a theme through-out the site.
The content tag is the small snippet of text that the search engines use under the title in the search results. This is best used as sales copy to entice searchers to click on your link and enter your website. It can also contain additional secondary keywords that would not fit in the title tag.
The last meta tag is the keyword tag. This tag has been down graded considerably by the search engines during the last few years. Some webmasters don’t bother adding keywords in this tag arguing that you are telling the competition your main keywords – information that is easy to find anyway. This tag was downgraded because SEO consultants stuffed the tag with too many keywords, irrelevant keywords. We recommend its use still, but only using a few keywords and not stuffing as it then appears like spam – not something you want your site to look like to Google.
Content
The biggest problem with most business sites is that they are all sparkle and no content. Search engines like Google are information retrieval systems and they want and love information, primarily text. This problem can be overcome somewhat by inbound links but that can get very costly.
Content should be relevant and original and not be overly concerned with keyword density – that idea is past its sell by date – however I still like to get the main keywords to be above 2%. On page heading tags should be used and be relevant. Google’s technology is getting much better all the time and they now recognise synonyms and acronyms – latent semantic indexing is becoming a reality.
Content is all about calls to action. Your visitors should read what you write and fill in a form or call you, get out their credit card, buy – this is the whole point of the written words on your page. Some of the information you are giving to your visitors is of course intended to illustrate you know what you are talking about – but then have that call to action.
Link Structure
When the search engine visits your website it should be able to follow all the hyperlinks and index all the pages in your site. JavaScript, frames, flash should never be used to contain any hyperlinks, just straight forward HTML – it is fine if this is dynamically generated.
URL’s should contain at most only one dynamic parameter. More than this can sometimes frighten off the search robots. For example AIB one of Irelands biggest companies has the most horrible URLs – this causes them to lose out on search engine rankings. There is also Sainsburys and Superquinn which have levels of their site that is not indexed by Google – these are mistakes that should not be made – the internet was built using links, that fact should not be ignored.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are not necessary for small sites, but it does not harm to submit one. For sites that have hundreds of pages, and pages that are three levels deep or more a sitemap is an absolute. Sitemaps can be automatically generated and up dated periodically.
IP location
If your target market is Ireland have your hosting there. Same if your target market is the UK, have the hosting there. This will make optimising your site easier and quicker. It is possible to get world wide rankings using ccTLD’s but some fore though can save money.
Page Views & Time on Site
Google have been talking for a while about being able to include visitor satisfaction in the rankings; this is always worth watching anyway. Bounce rate should be kept to lower than 50% – this can sometimes be difficult for business sites. If the bounce rate is too high it indicates one of several problems:
- Ranking for the wrong queries
- Non relevant content
- Awful design
Analytics
Recording data is a must for on going success. Knowing who comes to your site, how long they stay, what pages they visit, how they find your site, keywords used. All of this is crucial. Install an analytics package as soon as possible.
File Size
Conventional SEO wisdom has said the maximum page size should be 150kb – that Google will not cash pages larger than this. – they are now caching pages larger than this This is true; I know for certain I have also done the experiment to find out, it is very easy to do especially on a blog.
The above is only a general out line of search engine optimisation. It does not discuss page sculpting, moving from broad to narrow, no-follows on disclaimers etc, duplicate page issues, canonical URL’s - for more information on SEO for your own site please call us or email leslie@cubeonlinemarketing.ie
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