Getting started with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This document is the first part of three stage guide to help you begin a search engine optimisation program on your website. It assumes that you at least have an understanding of what SEO is. If you don’t – just call us on 01793 680866 and we can help you.

Part 1)  Keyword research

With so much riding on getting the keyword selection process right here are some pointers for identifying the most effective keywords for your business.

Where to start?

Website Reports
If you already have a website and you have access to the site statistics (usually provided via your hosting provider) or maybe you set up your own using Google Analytics (well done if you did by the way!) these stats are a good place to start. Amongst other things they’ll tell you what keywords or phrases searchers used to find your site. These can often make interesting reading.

Brainstorm sessions
Arrange a brainstorm session or sessions with colleagues in your business and come up with a list of keyword phrases that you think people would use to find your business online.

If you are a sole trader you could ask other businesses associated with yours to help you with this exercise – suppliers or even better, existing customers. If you belong to a business networking group ask the members to assist you and there are always family and friends around.

2. Content is King they say…and they’d be right!

Once you have established what your target keywords are going to be you need to focus on your website content.

Content is critical to the success of your website. This is pretty self evident, but often people simply do not spend enough time and effort on developing their website’s content. If you are spending out time and money to have a website built you really do need to make sure that you populate it with properly developed content. Not to do so is like building a brand new hotel and then furnishing it with shoddy and mismatched furniture. Who is going to stay in a place like that?

Content is important therefore for two main reasons:

1) From an SEO point of view having properly developed content will significantly help you to improve your search engine rankings.
2) It is obviously what your site visitors are going to see and experience when they land on your site. If it is poorly developed, doesn’t give them the information they require, is difficult to read and not properly structured then they will not stay on your site for long and your website will quickly become just another cost instead of an investment that pays back.

So what does great website content look like?
From the perspective of point 1 initially i.e. improving your search engine rankings, your content should be proportionately focussed on your keywords for that page. Think of each page as theme and your content should support and develop that theme throughout. Don’t be tempted to develop too many themes on one page – keep the theme as tightly focussed as possible. If you feel it is getting too big and unwieldy then break it down into sections and if appropriate make these extra pages.

I know we are focussing on SEO here but bear in mind no search engine will ever buy anything from you. So do make sure that what you are writing appeals to your target audience.

Also be aware that when I talk about pages on a website there are effectively two elements to the Page;

•  the visible content – what the human visitor sees
•  the tagging information which is what the search engine reads. They also read the visible content too of course.

We’ll start with the use of keywords in the visible content section of the page. Here it is very important to put your keywords in the following places and use them in the following ways:

Headings and sub headings – get your most important keywords into the heading and lesser keywords into the sub headings.

Use bold text – to highlight keywords but only where it looks right to do so. Bolding words gives them emphasis from an SEO point of view but use this sparingly. This is where you need to think of the human viewer rather than the search engine. Bolding all your keywords may make the page look like a cheap mailshot and you could well lose your visitor as a result.

Body Text – this is the content that comes after the headings. You need to be using your selected keywords and phrases throughout the body text. Ideally get some in the opening paragraph and again in the closing paragraph. Do not over do it though! Count the number of words on the page and then count the number of times you have used the keywords. If your keyword usage exceeds 20% you have gone too far and you must cut back. Once again when your content has been written review it from the human visitor point of view, never lose sight of the fact that you are writing for them.

Links – if you have links in your content either to other websites or to other pages on your website – and you really should have – try to use a keyword in the link.

Make sure your target audience finds your website and not your competitors! Find out more about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC).

These are the key areas where you need to use your keywords in the visible content part of the page. Now we should consider the other part of the page which the human visitors don’t see and we’ll call this the Tagging element.

Tagging

We now need to turn our attention to the page tags themselves and we will look at the following four main tags:

• Title tag
• Description tag
• Keywords tag
• Alt tag

Title Tag – the title tag is very important as this is what the search engine displays in its listed search returns see example below which appears on page 1 of Google based on a search for “hen party pamper days”

Title:           Hen Party Spa Days & Pamper Days
Description: Hen Party Spa Days & Pamper Days tailored for you in fabulous settings.
                      www.yourbeautysource.co.uk/LinkClick.aspx?link=81&tabid... - Cached

This is a small website we SEO’d recently. Two of the selected key phrases we wanted to focus on were Hen Party Spa Days and Hen Party Pamper Days.

Make sure that your title tag is meaningful and that it carries some of your top key words.
In this case it’s carrying all of our top keywords for that particular page.
Another point to note; there are 32 characters including spaces in this title tag. Our rule here is to keep below 60 characters.

Description Tag – equally as important as the title tag is the description tag, not so much for SEO purposes but because Google often uses this tag when displaying the search returns.

You should carefully craft the description tags for each important page in your site, work the keywords into the description and make the description as compelling and appealing as possible. Treat it like a minimised advert – because when it is displayed in the search returns with the other 9 search results you need to make the searcher click through onto your website and your description is what they will more than likely base their decision on.

Our rule in terms of available characters to use here is do not exceed 200 (including spaces). You don’t want your description to be truncated and end with...
so keeping under 200 will avoid that.

Keywords Tag – Oh yes - the famous keywords tag! Now this may come as a surprise to you but the keywords tag is not used by Google for SEO purposes. This is what they said recently in a blog post;

“Our web search …disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.” Sep 21, 2009

Neither does Bing support the tag and Yahoo! also recently claimed to have stopped using this tag too though this was actually disproved in a simple test. http://searchengineland.com/sorry-yahoo-you-do-index-the-meta-keywords-tag-27743

While there is some ambiguity about Yahoo’s position we would continue to populate the tag if only because it is a convenient place to put all your keywords used on that page in a convenient place if you need to refer to them!

Alt Tags – The search engines can not read pictures, so if you have images on your pages these need to be labelled so that the search engines can make sense of them. You label your images via the alt tags. View a few websites and hover over the pictures, see how many times you see some text appear – this is the alt text. When you are using your alt tags make sure that you work the keywords into your labelling as it will assist with SEO.

So we have discussed page content and now we need to say a few words about the page structure. You need to make sure that your page is structured correctly for the web.

People generally read websites in a particular way when they are in the initial search stages looking for the information they require. In these initial stages they will often just skim the page to try and determine quickly if the page is going to be relevant to them. It is important therefore that you can get your key points over in a very short time frame and to do this effectively you need to structure your page for web reading. Some key pointers here are;

• Use headings and sub-headings
• Use short punchy paragraphs
• Make use of bullet points
• Use visuals to reinforce your theme – good quality pictures and graphs/charts

Make sure that you check your spelling and grammar. Do not underestimate the importance of this. Some people will only tolerate one or two typos or grammatical errors before abandoning the page. Bad grammar and spelling errors does annoy people and can quickly destroy your website's credibility. It will pay you to get other people to check over your pages, you will be amazed at how many times you can read a page and still miss spelling errors.

3. Links – improving page rank and SE Ranking

This is probably one of the less well understood areas of any SEO program.

Creating an effective link building strategy should be a key part of your SEO and on-line marketing plan, but simply generating lots of links is not a strategy and will not help you much, if at all. You need to build quality inbound links.

What are the main benefits of a link building program?

• Drive traffic to your site – links to your site will carry in new visitors
• Boost your SE Rankings – sites with good inbound (and outbound) links will get a higher ranking
• Builds credibility and trust around your site – when important, popular and respected sites link to you this confers status, authority and trust on your site. These links endorse your site.

Be aware that you can’t have a successful link building strategy without good content. Your link building strategy will need to be built on three piers:

• Great content on your site
• In bound links from quality relevant sites
• Outbound links to valuable relevant information/resources

Linking for the sake of linking is of no value to your site, in fact it can be detrimental to your ranking position. A small number of links from popular and relevant sites is worth much more than hundreds of links from sites not relevant to your website.

Before you start your link building strategy make sure you understand your customers and visitors – what do they want to see and get from your site? What is important to them? What keeps them coming back?

How does link building boost your Search Engine Ranking?

In simple terms if someone links to your site you get a credit. If you link to a site they get a credit. But as you know, not all sites have equal standing, therefore not all links carry the same weight (often called juice). For instance a link from a relevant, popular, industry recognised site, with a high page rank will bring much more credit than a link from a zero page ranked, low traffic site.

Page Rank was developed by Google to differentiate a site's “value” or importance. Page Rank is a measure of how valuable Google believes a site to be. Page Rank has a significant effect on link credits. Developing an effective link building strategy is about getting quality links that will drive traffic to your site and boost your Search Engine rankings.

Link Building is not just about SEO

An effective link building strategy will certainly boost your search engine ranking but the net result of successful link building strategy will be to drive more traffic to your website and increase your conversion rate i.e. you sell more stuff, recruit more subscribers, make your site more valuable to advertisers etc.

So with that as the objective, when new visitors start arriving at your site your content had better be up to scratch or they will just leave without converting. Therefore an effective link building strategy is as much about your content development as it is about building links!

An effective link building strategy will involve providing additional content and resources for your increased visitor traffic. This makes your site more attractive to new links and that further increases traffic. In effect you create a virtuous spiral of traffic, links, more traffic and more links.

Once you achieve this you can congratulate yourself but don’t rest on your laurels because maintaining success will demand an ongoing commitment. Once your content starts to go stale your traffic levels will drop and the whole thing could go into reverse!

A link building plan – step by step

Just so that you are aware...the more you put in to this the more you will get back. You decide how much time and effort you can dedicate to this area of online marketing.

Step 1) Baseline your current position.
Find out who is linking to you right now. There are many free tools on the web that will help you do this. Try www.marketleap.com  or www.linkpopularity.com Google will also tell you if you type link:yourwebaddress and run a search. Yahoo and MSN have similar tools.

When you have a list of who is linking to you – visit them and see why they have linked to your site. What type of site are they? What other sites do they link to? If you can understand why these sites are attracted to your site you can use this in future link building approaches to other similar sites.

2) Check out your competitors
This is as important, almost, as knowing who is linked to you. Again you can use free online tools and resources to find this information out such as www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com This exercise is beneficial for several reasons:

• You’ll see what you are up against and it should help you set some targets. It should also motivate you!
• You will inevitably find some good link target sites for you to approach.
• You will see which sites are playing a role in your industry. Check out these sites and you’ll find a load more potential link sites.

You can further expand your target links list by visiting industry portals and other more general portal sites. You can also run a search using your own keywords to see which sites get found – run down the search returns and look for possible sites to approach for links.

3) Make sure you understand your appeal
If you are going to succeed with your link building strategy you must understand what value you offer to your potential link partners. Visit their sites and ask yourself:

• Do you have any tools on your site which their visitors might wish to use?
• Have you got some resources on your site – white papers, surveys,” how to” guides etc that are relevant to their visitors?
• Do you have an inside track, or access to breaking news relevant to them or their visitors?

This is your value and the reason why your target sites might link with you. If you have any of these, can you create more of the same, or enhance them or expand them in some way?

4) Set clear and realistic objectives
You can set basic number based targets such as increasing the number of links by 50, or generating 20% more unique visitors. Or you can be more sophisticated about it and set targets related to increased sales, increased revenues and improved page rank.
Whatever you do make sure you measure your performance monthly at least.

5) Create a link friendly site
Look at your site from a potential link partner’s point of view.

How easy is for them to link to you?

• Is your site organised in sections so they can link to the relevant section that their visitors are interested in?
• Are you blocking access to resources by having unnecessary registration or log in requirements?
• Does your site have a lot of java script or does it use frames? These are not good because to achieve a link requires each page or resource to have its own url.

6) Link out when it adds value to your visitors
Do not be afraid of linking to other sites yourself when it adds value to your own visitors. This simply makes your site more useful and valuable – so your visitors will return to use these resources again and again.

7) Ask for inbound links from your target list
Prepare a linking request carefully and treat each link building approach as unique and personal. Understand why the site you are approaching might want to link to you and then send a short linking request e-mail. Make sure it goes to a person if at all possible (not “the webmaster”), state where you’d like the link to be placed, state the value to them/their visitors, provide them with link code, request a confirmation.

Keep a record of requests made and do acknowledge sites that link with you.

8) Measure and monitor the results This is important – even if you just look at the basic level you should measure:

• increased link popularity,
• your position vs. your competitors,
• new sites appearing without being approached,
• website traffic levels.

Make no mistake – link building is a time consuming exercise that will take some time before results show. But if you can develop an effective link building strategy it will pay back – and all the time and effort you put in will be well worth it.

If you would like to know more about Search Engine Optimisation or Internet Marketing strategies or website development in general please e-mail steve@digitaltradingcreative.co.uk  or just call us on 01793 832102.  We’d be delighted to hear from you.