Learn To Search Engine Optimise Your Site

Why Bother With SEO?

Every commercial website is a marketing tool, usually designed to convert as many visitors as possible to users, subscribers or customers. To be truly successful though, most need to attract a large number of visitors – the more visitors equates to more users, subscribers or customers. The key is to get the maximum amount of visitors possible. The best way to do this is through search engines.

For any business that wants to rely on internet business, you need to be ranking well within these search engines for terms or phrases you know your customers will be searching for so understanding your customer is paramount.

Keywords vs. Key phrases
'Keywords' and 'key phrases' are some of the most referred to terms in SEO, and some of the least understood – the fact is they are the same.

You need to know the terms your audience will be searching for that relate to your site. Knowing these terms, and adjusting your site to perform well when they are searched for will give you a huge boost to your search engine traffic. You can use this book to find the best keywords for your site.

TOP TIP: Be careful – don't assume you know what is being searched for – do some research and find out what is actually being searched – you can use the The Google Keyword Tool which can scour your site and tell you what keywords are more sought and how much competition there is.

Once you understand the terms your visitors will be using search engines to find information on, you need to ensure your website shows well when these are searched.

Do not believe all the hype
Some people will tell you this is down to links, some down how long a website has been established or many other potential reasons – and some of these can be true, but nothing is true in all instances.

The best way to accomplish this is to look at the websites that rank highly and understand what they are doing to rank well. If you want to see how well your site compares get the FREE Basic SEO Report offered here, if you need more information get the FULL Report - both of which tell you in detail what you need to change to rank higher than your competitors.

Is it down to links? If you want to know just check – go to Google and enter link:http://www.websitename_goes_here.co.uk and Google will check to see how many links are on record coming to that website. If it's not many you can be pretty sure this isn't why it's ranking well – if there are hundreds then it may be the reason why.  Yahoo offers the same service using the same information and is quite often more comprehensive.

Is it down to the sites history and position on the internet? Possibly – a great way to check it to use the Google toolbar and enable the 'Page Rank' feature. This will show you how important the page is compared to other pages on the internet. A higher 'Page Rank' the more likely it is to rank highly. You can also go to Alexa.com and enter the website name - it could tell you a bit about it's history, sites linking, keywords etc ... ( use http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/website_name_goes_here.co.uk)

As a point of interest, 'Page Rank' is named such, as Larry Page, one of Google's founders, developed it.

Is 'Content King' as some say? Again, this is very situational and not a rule to enforce without reason – if you find that the sites history or links are not particularly impressive, it may well just be down to how well the site is structured, linked and written. If this is the case, you can do plenty yourself to help your site.

Check the top 10 you want to compete against – check your 'meta-tags' against theirs, ensure your content, keywords and description are filled in as these can also help a great deal once you rank to get people to choose your listing compared to others (the title and description are shown in Google's results). Ensure your site is similar in word count, content type and keyword density to those doing well.

Check your competition and emulate their success. Don't copy them as this won't work – you need your own unique content, but checking how often words should appear is a great idea to ensure you don't saturate a term, or not mention it enough.

Do Nothing and you Get Nothing! This covers some of the simple aspect of your webpage and is enough to get you a marked improvement on your sites ranking, and in some instances enough to get you in the top 10 – but there is much more you can consider. For example, if you have the knowledge you could also compare and emulate with those in the top 10 the number of words, characters or instances of keyword in your H1 and H2 tags, inbound and outbound links and anchor text, image alt tags, bolded words, the first sentence of text or even the website URL.

If you manage to check and optimise for each of these elements you are likely to get to at least the top 20 and quite likely the top 10 – getting to the very top positions though will likely include effective link building and other external optimisation on top of the on-site optimisation we've focussed on here.

Help Is At Hand ... If you need help with any aspect of optimising your site, use our FREE SEO Report or Complete SEO report to see what needs to be done. If you need help implementing the changes we can also help. Contact us to let us know.