The basics of search engine optimization (SEO)
Keyword research
You should start off by researching what keywords and keyword phrases are most relevant to your business as well as how competitive they are and what kind of search volume they attract. There are plenty of online tools available.
Meta tags & the title tag
Now that you've done your keyword research, you are ready to write your meta tags. These lines of found in the 'head' section of your website's code. Below are examples of the most important tags, although the keyword meta tag does not do much these day. The Robots meta tag can be left out all together, because the default behaviour is to index pages and follow links.
- Title tag
- Description meta tag
- Keywords meta tag
- Robots meta tag
<title>Put important keyword phrases at the beginning of this tag. Max 90 characters.</title>
<meta name="Description" content="A brief description of the pages content. Use keyword phrases and try to use under 200 characters." />
<meta name="Keywords" content="Your most important keywords and keyword phrases.Choose carefully and use the most important ones. " />
This line tells the search engines that they are allowed to index the page.
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
Headings
Use h1,h2,h3 headings and include relevant keyword phrases in your headings.
Web page content - How to write good content for your website.
Search engines really like quality content. Good copy writing is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. It is important to have a high keyword density; which means that your most important keywords should be repeated frequently, but in a logical way. You can't simply repeat them over and over again. Highlight your most important keyword phrases in bold text. Try and target long tail keyword phrases. One approach to target keyword phrases is to add adjective before and after the keyword that you are tageting. See the example below which targets the following keyword phrases:
- Accounting software
- Small business accounting software
- Accouting package
- Simple accounting progam
- Affordable bookkeeping software
- Easy accounting package
- This list could go on, but hopefully you get the idea by now...
Example:
A simple small business accounting software package for South African businesses. This is an affordable, easy to use bookkeeping program.
Alternative text for images
Use relevant alternative text for all of your images.
File names
Use file names that are relevant to the page's content. With referance to the previous example, the page would be saved as accounting-software.html. Always use hyphens instead of an underscore.
Get links to your website
This is a really important part of search engine optimization. Try and get links from websites that are relevant to your website.
How to get links:
- List your website in business directories.
- Write articles and submit them to the top article submission websites.
- Join a forum and put your website's URL in your signiture.
- Start a blog.
- Paid submission such as Yahoo.
- There are many other creative ways of getting links to your site.
Try and get links from websites or web pages that have a high Page Rank (PR). You can check the PR by installing the google toolbar and selecting 'show page rank' from the options menu. Check your own website's PR.
Submit a sitemap
There are a number of online tools that you can use to generate a sitemap. Once you've got a sitemap, join Google's webmaster tools and submit it.
Search engine submission
Don't get carried away with submitting your URL to the search engines. It is better to follow the techniques discussed previously and allow the search engines to find your website naturally.
Clean up your code
Search engines like content, not code. Clean up your code and check out your code/content ratio (Just google it).
Use online tools
There are a number of free search engine optimization tools available. These SEO tools can check links to your website, your PR, code/content ratio, website traffic, keyword density and so on...
Learn from your competitors
Have a look at what your competitors are doing; especially those that are doing well in the SERPS. What keyword phrases are they targeting? Where are they getting their links from?
Mimic customer behaviour
Wait a few weeks and then act as a consumer looking for a product. Try using a search engine to look for your product/service. Don't search for your business's name - Remeber; you are a consumer searching for a product.
That's about it. We've covered all the basics. This will be enough to get you started. Good luck with your search engine optimization!
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