Tips and Hints with this easy guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This brief overview is aimed to cover just some of the many aspects for making your website both user friendly and search engine friendly. This is what is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It is a process of combining a number of techniques and applying them to your website.

As the industry SEO grows, it is important to ensure that we are aware and are given the opportunity to explore this knowledge. Below are a few techniques listed to give you a better understanding of why there is so much emphasis and importance placed on SEO to achieve results. These web page elements are not necessarily in order of weight or importance.

Finding your keywords

Keyword Research – By researching for the relevant keywords and phrases will give you the advantage of knowing what the market is asking for. Keyword research is a vital component of any project and enables keyword rich copy to be written to suit website genre.

Have you ever sat down and played the memory game with your children? This is where you have matching card placed upside down and you have to turn them over until you get a match, remembering where the pair is situated. Now imagine how easy it would be if the cards were face up and you could see the pairs. Well that's what keyword research allows you to do. Find out what the best words and phrases are to write about ... without the guess work.

To achieve this there are a number of search tools that allows you to explore and give you these results. These words become the focus of the body copy and are strategically placed throughout your pages to bring up a match with search results. By targeting the wrong search phrase and you could end up with great search engine rankings for keywords that have no search requests. Keywords are the Key.

You will find a list of suggested tools with some free downloads in the Useful Links here.

Using keywords and phrases effectively

There are many other factors to consider when selecting what keywords to use. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to try and cram their copy with keywords – but effective writing for search engines is the key to achieving this balance. DO NOT try and target every keyword or phrase on every page.

Break keywords into categories

If you break your list of keywords down into categories you will find it easier to write your content around those keywords. If your website was about fishing – you wouldn’t target fishing rods, fishing lines, fishing gear, fishing report, fishing bait all on one page. These would be on separate pages all related to their specific category. This is because search engines index pages (within your site) and not websites. This will not only increase your chances of obtaining better page rankings, but also increase your customer sales conversions by bringing the visitor to the most relevant page.

Optimized for Keywords

All pages of your site have to be optimized for the keywords and content within that page. By filling the meta name = keyword tag with dozens of keywords that are the same will not get the results you are looking for. You are better to choose 3 or 4 specific keywords or phrases and write the content to the Topic so it is relevant and makes sense.

Webpage Title

This is an important key factors in achieving high ranking in searches. The Title Tag must be constructed so that it has keywords in it and also influences your website's position in the search engine results page. This is equally as important than body copy.

This is the text that is displayed in the search results page and what encourages people to click on your site. The Title Tag is the text you see in the blue panel at the very top of your browser window and should give a brief description of your site. Some search engines prefer to see shorter Title Tags that are succinct in describing the content on the page. 80 characters are considered the acceptable limit.

It is important to remember the positioning of the Title Tag. It should be the very first thing spidering search engines pick up and positioned directly below the HEAD see below.
<head>
<title>Your Page Title Here</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Your Description">
<meta name="Keywords" content="Your Keywords">
</head>

The page description is below the title and should closely match the title of your page.

Using keywords in HI Tags

Using keywords in the HI Tags (which is generally the first line or sentence of text to the page) can be an advantage, but the opinion of some SEO consultants differ. Too much use of HI Tags can be considered a disadvantage.

Site Navigation

The first thing users look for is the site navigation and and where they have to click next. Visitors don't want to have to guess and want good descriptive links or visual clues. Therefore, it is extremely important to spend time planning the architecture for a friendly, user experience. First impressions build a degree of trust and readers are already forming an opinion of the writers understanding of their content provided to them.

Domain names

It seems something people love to debate about. Some would say it is an advantage to have the domain names the same as a keyword. It’s not the most important thing but it adds weight as the title tag and keyword content is all a match for search engines. It isn’t the answer to getting on top of your rankings but every little bit helps.

Multiple Domains

Having multiple domains pointing to the one domain in the attempt to get higher rankings is no longer a real benefit. If your pages are optimized efficiently using more than one strategy your site will get good rankings without any added expense of getting extra domains.

Page Ranking

Page Ranking is part of the Google toolbar. It is Google’s way of judging the content relevance and quality of a site. It rewards sites that comply to, and put into practice many of the elements spoken about in this SEO guide. However the page ranking should only be used as a guide.

Inbound - outbound – internal links

Inbound Links refers to other sites that link to your site. This is one of the keys elements to getting better rankings on your site. The sites linking to yours must be relevant topics and quality sites that have a high page rank linking to yours.

Outbound Links refers to sites you link to. Quality and quantity are probably the key factors in this. It certainly helps to link externally and it all helps to add value, especially when your site is new.

Internal Links refers to links within your site. Some search engines give this greater credibility than others. Make good use of all pages of your site with Internal links.

Image file names and images alt text

Image file names are another key to making good use of your keywords. Name your image files after keywords with no capitals letters. If you have two words use a dash instead of underscore. A dash is read as a space in search engines and is easier to read than an underscore Eg. keywords-phrases.jpg

Image Alt text – refers to the alternate text that shows when you run your mouse over the image. Use words describing the image and keywords related when inserting images and graphics.

What to Avoid

• DO NOT try and target every keyword or phrase on every page.
• Don’t link to another site that is poor quality or bad example
• You should never leave this Title Tag blank
• Overuse of keywords and deliberately repeating them will see your ranking drop as the spiders analyse your page for content relevance to those words.
• Never try and cheat the search engines by putting hidden text on your page. That is having black text on black background filled with keyword text.

These have been just some hints of the optimization process and if you would like more explanation or your website evaluated for Search Engine Optimization contact Key Essentials today.

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