Search engine optimisation is integral if you want your business to reach more customers. In an era where more of us live, work, shop and socialise online, you need to crash through the rankings every time somebody searches for your product or services. If you don't ensure that you come out on top of Google you will drown in the quick sand of search engines - dragging you further down the thousands upon thousands of search results, never to see the light of day.
To understand how to master search engines, you need to know how they work. Software programmes, such as Google, use crawlers or spiders to scan websites. They decide how relevant your site is to the searcher. Spiders read text so first you need to ensure your webcopy has the right keywords. If you're selling tea, than the word tea, and the associated keywords – teapot, teabags, tea leaves – need to be used liberally in your copy. Using those keywords in your title, subheadings and links will optimise your site. Based on keywords and links, the spiders will index your website according to how relevant it is to the search phrase. If you have links to other sites such as the British Tea Association, or major tea suppliers and organisations, this will also factor.
- Keyword research.
Keyword research entails finding out what phrases people are looking for and how competitive they are. Keyword tools such as Adwords, Overture and Keyword Discovery can help guide you. If you begin with a major theme, in this instance tea, you can then break it down and find phrases relevant to the site. The more relevant and specific you are the better. Tea is an extremely competitive, broad search phrase. But highly targeted phrases, i.e. ‘Fairtrade tea' or ‘Darjeeling tea' is more specific, so will offer a higher conversion rate.
Writing naturally around your chosen subject will help ensure you use associated words. ‘Tea' will be a high traffic phrase, but a specific, rare herbal blend of tea will be a low traffic phrase. Using plenty of low traffic phrases is called longtailing. Lots of low phrases can help you accumulate thousands of visits – the more associated phrases you cover, the higher the conversion rate.
- Keyword density
The title tag is important. You should use the targeted phrase in the title tag (which should be no more than nine words or 65 characters including spaces). The title tag should be unique on each page. Too many words dampen the effect. The keyword needs to be near the start. In fact, the keyword should be the FIRST word in your title tag.
The Meta description (what appears below the title tag on search results) should be less then 140 characters including spaces and unique to each page. As it can display in search results it should be punchy to draw people in. Make it compelling - it can help with click-through rates.
Keyword density - Use the keyword throughout your content. There's no particular percentage or number of times to use keywords but it's best to use it naturally throughout the copy so it's readable to a human, rather then squeeze it in too much. Use keywords early on in the first paragraph. If you are using a key phrase such as 'tea bags' and you split the words up, it dampens the effect. Proximity of the words count, although using keywords separately still helps for optimising those singular words. But if it's a phrase you are targeting – use it exactly as it is in its entirety as much as possible.
- Structuring the site to make it spider friendly
Keywords. When it comes to how you structure your site you need to consider, as discussed above, your use of keywords. It isn't only the words you choose to put on your site, but where you put them that impact on your ranking success. Use your keywords in your ULR, in your titles and subtitles, and in the opening paragraphs. And don't just concentrate on your homepage. Target the pages the next step down from your homepage too.
Link popularity - Within the site, ensure your internal pages are linking into each other. Point every page in your site back to your homepage to strengthen that even further.
Page Rank In Google, actual page rank exists on every page on the internet, calculated on the amount of links coming into your site, divided by the amount of links linking to you. Page rank is overall accumulation of these links, known as ‘link juice' or ‘ranking power' – the higher the page rank, the better. And the better quality your in-coming links are, the more power they have on your ranking.
Site structure - to get the best flow of page rank you need a hierarchical structure. No pages should be three clicks away from the homepage, it's too many steps for a crawler to get to. The most important pages should be one step away from your homepage.
- Site Accessibility
Google likes text.
If you want to make your site easy for Google and its spiders to index, words are important. Links that some search engines can't follow include Flash, Javascript, drop down menus and submission forms. The best way to ensure that your site is accessible is to include a site map on your site – a glossary - as search engine spiders can easily follow it.
For more SEO Rules, see Part Two…