Keyword Research
This is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Knowing what consumers are typing into a search engine to find your product or service is essential. There are many tools to help you discover which keywords are profitable and help you decide which terms to optimise your website for.Most SEO firms will guide you in determining the correct keyword terms. One of the best ways to find out is to ask a user when they ring your company.
“How did you find us?” If they say Google, ask them what words they were putting into the search engine. Another way to identify keywords is to type your product or service into a search engine as if you were a consumer and analyse the websites that are listed in the top ten. Alternatively, you can choose to use tools such as Google AdW ords’ Suggestion Tool or Overture. Just remember, what would your customer type into a search engine to find your product? If you are not listed under that keyword term then you may want to consider SEO.
Linking Strategies
A major contributing factor to higher search engine results is links to your website. Do not be fooled into thinking quantity is king here, quality is far better for rankings than volume.
For example, if you sell lounge chairs and a webpage that is ranked number one in Google for “lounge chairs” links to your site, this will be much better than 100 websites linking to your site that have nothing to do with lounge chairs.
Likewise a site that uses the wording 'lounge chairs' in a link to your website will be superior than using just your domain name. Another way to build links to your website is to create unique content that is valued by readers. One of the methods to do this is to provide regularly updated content, online newsletters, blogs and podcasts. If you create information that is helpful, informative or a valuable resource, other site owners may link to it therefore increasing your rankings. Most SEO firms will make recommendations about the types of site you should approach for linking purposes.
Page Titles, Meta Data and Content
Another aspect to consider when analysing your website is the page titles and meta data that is played on your pages. Page titles are the names of the pages on your website like Home and About Us. If your company was to sell teapots in London, it would be more beneficial for your homepage to be named ‘Teapots for sale London” as opposed to “Home”.
Meta data are keywords that are added to the code of a webpage. Internet browsers do not display this information but search engine spiders use this data to learn more about the page it is crawling. Using keyword-rich meta data can assist in achieving higher rankings however, make sure extensive keyword research is conducted to find the keywords of most value. These are some of the basic aspects of search engine optimisation that can have a positive effect on search engine rankings. Content is extremely important considering many search engines are starting to bring Latent Semantic Indexing into the mix. LSI means that search engines will hold more weight to pages that have related terms in the content than one term repeated many times. Relevant, timely and unique content naturally gets linked to as well, you will find if you provide this type of content on your website, you may not have to chase links as much as you would if your content is a re-hash of other info on the net. Ultimately search engine optimisation is an ongoing process. Rankings rise and fall with the ebb and flow of the Internet. Competitors will change content and optimise their own website; search engines will change the algorithms that drive their results.
