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SEO – it’s not black magic
So you’ve invested in a website that looks great and is packed with useful information. But if no one knows it exists, you may as well have thrown your money out of the window. It’s time to let the world know about your website.
Promoting your site’s address on all your company’s literature is a good start, but you’ll still be missing out on large numbers of potential visitors who don’t know anything about your business. If you are really serious about driving traffic to your site, you need to get to grips with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
The basics of SEO aren’t that difficult to get grasp. Search Engine Optimisation is really just about 3 things:
- Submission – telling the search engines your site exists.
- Increasing visibility – helping them understand what it’s all about
- Building trust: getting them to trust your site over and above your competitors.
Of course, this post doesn’t cover everything to do with SEO, but it should give you a good introduction. Let’s start by looking at submission.
Stage 1: Submission
It’s worth checking first to see that search engines know you exist – do a search for your company and see what happens.
If there’s no sign of your site on Google, you’ll need to submit your site at www.google.com/addurl.html. While it’s definitely worth doing this, it can take Google a few weeks to action these new site submissions.
To speed the process up of being listed, get a link on an established website. Google can then follow this link to your website and then you’ll be up and running much sooner.
If finding your website was a struggle, it’s time to make it more visible.
Stage 2: Increasing visibility
Once Google knows your website exists, it will periodically visit it using its Googlebot to build up a picture of what it’s all about. So what is this mysterious Googlebot?
Understanding Googlebot
In simple terms, Googlebot is an application that automatically scans your site. It follows all the internal links it can find on your site to crawl each page looking for clues on what your website is about. It then stores all this information in its databases ready to spring into action when someone does a search.
Increasing your site’s visibility is all about choosing the best keywords and phrases that potential users will type into Google to find your site. You need to make sure the Googlebot can find them during its crawl.
When it’s crawling through your site, Googlebot is particularly looking for key words and phrases in the following on each page:
- The URL.
- The content
- The code behind the page
Now you understand what the Googlebot it’s up to, you need to start thinking like it, but with one important caveat. If it suspects you’re trying to trick it into thinking your site’s something it’s not, you’ll be labelled as a spammer and be heavily penalised.
Choosing your keywords – research
To decide on the best keywords to use, you need to do some research.
Start by listing all the search phrases you think people would use to find your site. Once you’ve got this list of phrases, you need to expand your list further to include the searches actually being used by Google users.
The best way to do this is to use Google’s own Keywords Tool which you can find at http://tinyurl.com/2cvvx8.
Google’s keyword tool allows you to enter one of your search phrases and see the real-life searches related to it. Enter each of your search terms and see what it brings back. For example, “cheap car insurance” returned related searches including “cheap car insurance quote”.
What’s more, the keyword tool also provides you with the monthly search volumes for each phrase. This is really valuable information to help you select the best keywords to use.
Choosing your keywords – selection
Unfortunately, you can’t include all the keywords on your list as it will dilute your results. You need to be selective and decide from all the potential keywords which are the ten best ones. Also, this isn’t just a matter of picking the terms with the highest volume of searches, because that’s what everyone else is doing. You need to set yourself apart and start thinking strategically.
To get the best results, you need to base your selection on striking the balance between the search demand for your keywords versus the number of sites competing for it. Finding a niche that you can dominate will generate more visitors than being lost down the rankings of a popular term.
It’s now time to put these phrases in all the right places.
Using your keywords: page URLs
Your page’s URL is a good indicator of its content for search engines.
This makes sense – if you wanted to tell the world about “car insurance”, the first thing you’d do is go out and buy a domain like www.carinsurance.com (sorry that’s already gone).
Now the chances are that your site’s domain will be your company’s name. But this shouldn’t stop you picking your most attractive keyword and optimising the full URL of each page like this:
www.someinsurancebroker.co.uk/carinsurance
Always avoid generic names such as “page2.html” in your URLs – it’s just a wasted opportunity.
Using your keywords: page content
So the search engines now have an idea of what your site is all about. Next, they start to look for more clues. And the best place to find these clues is within the content of each page, especially within headings and the body text.
The search engines scan through your content trying to pick out the most important words on the page. They then score each word based on how early and how regularly it appears. With this in mind, work your chosen keywords into the headings and first parts of your body text.
You need to be very careful not to make the search engines think you’re trying to trick them. If you repeat certain phrases again and again all you’re going to do is trigger spam filters and you’ll be penalised.
Using your keywords: Page Code
Behind your site sits the code that tells your browser how to display each page. The final part of making your site more visible is to optimise this code with your keywords.
But don’t worry if all this talk of code sounds too technical. This is where Ignition can help you out.
Page title
Of the 3 elements of code optimisation, page title is definitely the one to concentrate on.
Google gives far more weighting to what appears in the page title than it does to either description or keywords. It’s therefore prime real estate to place your most attractive keywords.
Moreover, Google uses the text in your page title when it lists your site in its search results. This makes it very useful to entice visitors into your site.
Page description and keywords
Page description and keywords have much less value to Google, probably because it’s been the most abused area of Search Engine Optimisation in the past. However, they do still have some relevance for other Search Engines, so it’s worth including them. As with Page titles, make sure they include your most attractive keywords.
Stage 3: Building trust:
The third and final stage of web optimisation is vital to getting high up in the search listings – building Google’s trust in your site.
Even if you’ve done a great job on stages 1 and 2, the best you can hope for is to be in contention to appear in Google’s search results. But, with millions of sites out there, your site could get easily lost.
Remember that Google’s aim is to provide it’s users with the most relevant content for their searches. So when you do a search on Google, it ranks the results by the level of confidence it has in each page’s relevance to your search.
So how does Google come to a decision on how much trust it has in your site?
The simple answer is that it counts the number of external links into your site. The more links it counts, the more confidence it has.
Google uses this link count to give each page a score out of 10 – this is the all important Google Page rank. Popular sites such as the BBC achieve scores like 9/10.
But it’s not just a simple equation of more links = higher page rank. Google goes a step further and looks at the quality and relevance of each link to decide how reliable and appropriate they are. So a link from the BBC page talking about insurance will be given far higher weighting than links from 1/10 page rank sites that have nothing to do with insurance. It’s therefore really important to get good quality links from content that’s relevant to yours.
Another way to get good links is by contributing to public forums and to write interesting blog posts (like this one) and, hopefully, have the world link to it just because they like it.
Summary
If you’ve followed the simple steps in this blog, you’ll go a long way to improving the promotion of your website. To summaries, here are 5 rules to help you on your way:
- Be Patient. Don’t expect the changes you’ve made to your site to appear on Google straight away – remember that the Googlebot will only visit your site every few weeks, if you’re lucky.
- Build those links to boost your page rank scores – keep them relevant and avoid the paid listings, otherwise the search engines will think you’re trying to artificially increase your ranking.
- Be consistent – whatever keywords you decide to compete on, use them consistently across all the different elements of your pages.
- Be relevant – You’ll be found out and penalised if you use keywords that aren’t relevant to your site.
- Experiment – The weighting Google gives to different elements of SEO are constantly changing so keep experimenting and tweaking to find out what works best for your site.
Hopefully this blog should have helped demystify Search Engine Optimisation. Investing in SEO can definitely pay dividends if done properly. If you think you need help, why not give Ignition a call.
Tags: SEO