Search Engine Optimization

If you have your own website then it is quite likely that you have experienced the anticipation of getting your site online followed by the disappointment of not getting the volumes of traffic you had hoped for.  When it comes to websites, you can’t take a ‘build it and they will come’ approach regardless of how interesting the content may be.

To get serious traffic on your site you will need to rank well on the search engines, mainly Google. You can't just ask Google to put your site at the top of the rankings; it's calculated using a complex algorithm which aims to find the most relevant sites for a particular search term. The process of boosting your natural search engine rankings is known as ‘search engine optimization’ or SEO for short.

Here are ten basic steps to improving your websites search engine optimization;

1: Start with keyword research

You know what you product is all about but you need to understand what terms people are searching for that might lead them to you. To gain insight into what people are actually seeking in your industry you should use one of the paid or free keyword research tools such as the Google keyword tool. The Google keyword tool allows you to view approximate search volumes in the country you are targeting in relation for certain phrases. For example, you type in a generic word such as ‘credit cards’ and it provided a list of popular search terms related to credit cards such as ‘low rate credit cards’, ‘credit card comparison’ and so on. If you are targeting a competitive industry then you may find it very hard to rank to ultra competitive generic terms such as ‘credit cards’ so you are better off to target more specific terms, sometimes known as ‘long tail’ terms such as credit card comparison in the case of a credit card related site. The keyword tools will show you these long tail terms that related the most closely to your business and still generate strong traffic volumes. Write a list of up to twenty or thirty keyword phrases that you want to rank well for. This step is essential to any SEO campaign.

2: Target Different Keywords to Different Pages:

It is not realistic for your homepage to rank well for every term in your list of keywords. Pick two or three key phrases to target on the homepage and then create targeted pages for the rest of your keyword terms. So for example, if you wanted to rank for ‘low interest credit cards’ create a specific page all about low interest credit cards. Use the keywords in your list and create some content based on these terms.

3: Use search engine friendly URL’s:

You may expect most small business web design companies to be experts in SEO but the majority of web design firms fail to provide search engine friendly sites, especially when designed using a content management system (CMS). Some CMS database driven sites create URL’s with what looks like a bunch of numbers and code at the end such as sitename.com/p=fs580-4545468 or something along those lines. The page extension has no value or meaning to your users or a search engine. Let’s imagine you had an travel related website and were adding a page on discount travel insurance; Instead of unmemorable codes as a URL you would be much better to have something such as sitename.com/discount-travel-insurance/. Doing this will help your site visitors and the search engines. The URL of a page is taken by Google as an important sign of what the content of the page is about.

4: Search engine optimize your page titles and meta tags:

The title you give to each page is very important for search engine rankings. Place your most important keywords at the start of the title of each page. It’s tempting to have your company name at the start of every title but it won’t do you any favours, swap it to the end of the title or remove it altogether. Don’t make some of the most common SEO errors such as having the same page title and description on every page, wasting the homepage with little content or having a home page title such as ‘Welcome’ which has no value.

5: Optimize Your Content:

The content of your site is crucial for search engine rankings. Google and other search engines are looking for relevant, unique and high quality information. Don’t let your home page get wasted, it’s the most critical page of your site. Whatever you do, avoid the big mistake of having a graphic or flash intro page as your home page. The search engines can’t read flash or images in the way they read text and your visitors will likely find the extra step to get the information they want frustrating. Keep your content fresh and update to date. Google sees the changes as a sign the site is active and new pages or content help build up your site. Ensure that your pages are targeted to a particular keyword and that the keyword is used a few times in key places such as the title, header and in the main text. Don’t go overboard; a keyword density of around 3% is normally a good guide.

6: Improve internal linking:

Make the most of your internal linking by linking to your key pages directly from the homepage and linking to the core keyword targeted pages throughout the site.

7: Clean up code and make sure the search engines can see your site:

Sometimes messy coding or issues such as having all your text within an image or flash make your site difficult or impossible to read by the search engines as the useful content is all hidden away. Ensure that all the text on your pages is not hidden and can be read by the search engines.

8: Link Building:

Having a great site is not enough; you need to do off-site SEO as well in the form of link building. The search engines like to see that you have high quality relevant links from other related websites, especially one way links. There a number of ways you can gain links back including writing blogs, commenting on related blogs, providing unique content to sites in exchange for links back to your site. Use so called ‘anchor links’ (e.g. ‘discount travel insurance) which is where you link the key phrase you are targeting instead of linking words such as your website name or ‘click here’.

9: Keep the search engines informed:

Make the jobs of the search engines easy by creating an .XML sitemap. There are a number of sites offering free .XML sitemap creators that index your site and create the file which you can then upload by signing up with Google Webmaster tools. These sitemaps aid the search engines in indexing every page of your site. If you have a CMS such as Wordpress you can even get free plugins that automatically create or update your sitemap everytime you edit your site or add content and then ping major search engines such as Google, Yahoo search and Bing from Microsoft.

10: Track and Refine

Install a good statistics script such as Google Analytics so you can track your growth in visitors, see where they are coming from, what the searched for to find you and where they went on your site. Adding fresh quality content will keep making the site more relevant to their needs and jeep them coming back. In conclusion, make sure that SEO is part of everything you do on your site. What you should end up with is a site that is very useful and user friendly as well as ranking well on the search engines. The core aim of SEO is not to con the search engines but simply to show them that your site is genuinely the best and most relevant for the terms people are searching for.

For professional help boosting search engine rankings contact Semi-Skimmed Web Design. We have offices in the UK and Australia and service all English speaking countries including the USA.

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