SEO is all about visibility

Search engine optimization is a major part of your web marketing. If prospective clients cannot find you, they cannot order or buy anything from you.  

All of these areas are essential in driving qualified traffic to your site –

• Define the purpose of the website

• Keyword research and selection

• Keyword placement throughout the web page

• Writing and language skills

• Creating a user and search engine friendly site

• Linking strategies and tactics

• Internal site linking structure

• Tracking and reporting  

 

Define the purpose of the website

1. Find out the goals for the site. The goals may be various, driving more target traffic, creating leads, entice people to call, selling a product online, introducing the company, etc. The SEO goal may be the combination of some goals.
    
2. Know the target market and analyze their online behavior.
    
3. Research the search terms to target exact clients.

Keyword research and selection

This is a critical component of effective search engine marketing in order to drive relevant traffic to your website.

1. Evaluate competitors’ websites for an idea of their targeted keywords - this can be found in the source code of their site and in the page content.
    
2. Add any more keywords deemed to be relevant
    
3. Use word tracker to generate related keywords and phrases based upon the initial research
    
4. Create new keyword phrases by combining keywords into combinations that may be typed into a search engine
    
5. Search major search engines for the top keywords on the list to find websites already ranking well for those words and study these sites and look for new keywords as well as potential content
    
6. Refine the keyword list through word tracker - taking into account both the popularity and the competition for the keyword - locate words that are popular but do not have an overwhelming amount of popularity.
    
7. Think also of relevant keywords that have a high likelihood of converting a visitor to a paying customer - e.g. televisions and television prices
    
8. Look at any data from past searches that have been referred to your site

With a refined keyword list containing only the best keywords and phrases these can now be integrated into the content of the site.  

 

Writing and language skills

Create compelling text on the web pages using the keywords to attract visitors. Create resources that a potential customer will find useful but may not directly apply to the sale. For example, how-to articles, tips or tutorials. This type of content page will have a positive effect on page rank with the search engines and also provide a useful resource that many other sites will wish to link to.

Search engines will look at various sections of a web document for repeating patterns of keywords and phrases, therefore it is important to achieve the correct keyword density and place your keywords and phrases in all the right places.

A web page of 300 words of focused, interesting and relevant content will rank far better than a page covering a range of topics in less detail.

Looking at competitors in the top positions will give a clearer understanding of the criteria that search engines are searching for.

More information on writing text content for web pages 

Keyword placement throughout the web page

1. Title tag – A carefully constructed Title Tag is extremely important for the website page ranking with the search engines. A crisply worded title tag that includes the most relevant researched keyword phrases and also gives a good summary of the web page’s content is far more likely to rank well with the search engines, as Google and other search engines use the content of the title tag during the ranking process to analyze the relevance of the web page.
   More information on title tag.
    
2. Meta elements – Meta tags are included in the code of your web pages and are included for the search engines benefit, helping them to list the site in the index more accurately. Meta tags therefore need to be optimized for each page and added into the code.
   More information on meta tags
    
3. Keywords – include all of the keywords from your site Description – include a narrative description of your site that contains one or two of your keywords.
   Robots – this meta tag tells robots which pages of your site should be indexed and which should not. The robots.txt file is a very important file if you want to have a good ranking on search engines.
   Abstract – used to add a second description to your site for engines that recognize this tag
   Author – to identify yourself as the author of the website Copyright – use to let other viewers and search engines know that your work is protected by copyright Distribution – this tag defines your audience. Currently three options are available: Global, Local, IU – (Internal Use) – meant for intranets Expires – use only if your site has an expiration date Language – use to define the language of your site e.g. EN=English FR=French Revisit – designed to tell a spider how often to revisit, however most, if not all spiders ignore it
   Rating – use to define your sites age and content rating. Values include: safe for kids, 14 years, general, restricted and mature. Some of the above tags are more important than others.
   More information on
   meta tags.
    
4. Header – the headings with the H1 attribute should contain keyword phrases to add more weight with the search engines.
    
5. Body – site content is the most important aspect of website marketing because it has an effect on both human and synthetic visitors. Fresh, focused and relevant content including your keyword phrases will have a positive effect on both human visitors and search engines.
    
6. Links - link text and link URL. Good and relevant links result in higher rankings and more traffic and are a critical component of most search engines’ page rank ‘weight’.
    
7. Alt text - each image on the website should include an “alt” attribute. This tag should include a keyword phrase that relates to the image.  

 

Creating a user and search engine friendly site

User friendliness is an important element of website design. Websites also need to be as friendly as possible to search engines.

1. HTML code - correctly formatted HTML code is important. If there are any errors the search engine spiders will have problems indexing the page content.
    
2. Site map - this will make it easier for search engine spiders and human visitors to index your site and all it's relevant content as links are provided to all pages. Place a link to the site map on the home page.
    
3. Develop a site theme - organize your site's content so that particular themes are enforced. A depth of knowledge on a topic across many pages will add more relevance to your site then those sites with only a section or a limited number of pages on a subject.
    
4. Avoid duplicating content – this will have a negative effect on your search engine ranking.
    
5. Frames, Flash, Javascript, Image Maps or Dynamic URLs - these can make it very difficult for search engines to index the site and therefore a high ranking is harder to achieve.  

Submit the site to the main search engines when the site is live and has been optimized as above.

 

Tracking and reporting

It is important to monitor the performance of your website as this is essential in evaluating online marketing and reshaping strategies where necessary.

What to monitor-

1. The site's position in the search engines for all the keywords
    
2. Monitor traffic to the site
    
3. Take a look at the keywords being used to find your site’s content
    
4. Identify strong and weaker areas and improve weaker areas

Measuring the onsite behavior of your visitors and spiders is essential, not only in gauging the effectiveness of your optimization efforts, but in measuring the effectiveness of your website design in converting those visitors to buyers. 

 

Search engine optimization is a long drawn out business.

The algorithms used by some of the big search engines are continually changing, which makes it almost impossible to keep up with them.

The best way to overcome these every changing goal posts is to build the best site you can, keep it up to date and optimize it using the best methods available to you. 

 

Linking strategies and tactics

Inbound links are those that come from other sites to yours.

Outbound links are links from your site to another one.

Internal links are links between pages within your own site.

Inbound links are the most important type of link, as these are viewed as a measure of popularity by the search engines.

More information on creating web page links 

 

Internal site linking structure

Navigation is a fundamental requirement on websites for the user and search engine spiders.

Simple and logical internal linking will result in any visitors using the site more effectively and finding what they are searching for.

Search engines spiders will also find it far easier to navigate a well-constructed and coded site and therefore this will eventually help search engine users find your content. 

 

Important linking tactics

1. Offer quality content to encourage other websites to link to yours
    
2. Submit you site to directories – these are good places to get free and decent inbound links.
    
3. Analyze competitive websites and contact those sites that are linking to them and try to get a link to your site as well, or instead of.
    
4. Link building should take place gradually and naturally to ensure that search engines give credit for the links and don't assume they are artificial links.
    
5. Quality rather than quantity is the most important factor. Websites related to your own topic and already ranking well and receiving traffic are far more advantageous than lots of links about different subjects
    
6. Blogs or forums related to your own content area are excellent places to post material and include a link to your website.
    
7. Ensure all links, inbound and outbound, include relevant and positive words.
    
8. Avoid using link farms and linking to websites that use spam.
    
9. Avoid having more outbound than inbound links.
    
10. If you use image links, ensure you use ‘alt’ tags to describe the content of the image and what it is linking to. Text links are preferable for search engines.
     
11. Don’t have more than 50 links on a single page and include text on the page.