All Things Search

Thought we would give you some good SEO tips for August 2010….. well here goes:

 1. Keyword Research - Before undertaking any SEO on your website you must always do keyword research. How else will you know what your target market are actually typing into search engines to find you.  To undertake keyword research (with limited time), make a list of possible keywords by thinking what potential customers would type into a search engine while looking for your website (also ask staff & friends for their keyword ideas). Then use the free Google Keyword Tool to find out search volume.  What you are trying to locate are keywords with high search volume, high relevancy to your website and ideally low competition (the holy grail!).

2. Content - Search engines love content. Try and update a website often with new content. If you already create a physical newsletter, why not re-use this collateral and put it in a blog or something. Remember… potential customers can land on any page on your website.

3. Backlink Anchor Text - When obtaining back links to your website (a back link is a link from someone else’s website pointing to yours - this is viewed as a ‘vote’ for your website) make sure that the anchor text of that link is keyword rich. If the link is just your domain name you are missing a trick - the likelihood is you will already rank for your domain (unless it is something generic).

4. Think of SEO From The Start - Don’t design your website without first considering SEO. Things like Flash and Java Script can be detrimental to your website unless dealt with in the proper manner. Getting things right from the start will benefit you in the long term.

5. No Short Cuts - There are no short cuts to good SEO. Tactics such as buying links and link exchanges may give you short term gains but will often cause problems in the long run. Things like this are known as ‘black hat SEO’ and should be avoided.  There was a time when link exchanges worked, then Google got wise to it so people started 3 way linking… Google soon got wise to that… see a trend happening :-). It’s not worth trying to trick the super brains that develop the search algorithms.

Hope you liked our top 5 SEO tips for August.

There are literally hundreds of ways (black hat, muddy hat and white hat) of getting great backlinks. Here I have highlighted a few that anyone can do that can achieve good quality, long lasting links:

1. Asking business partners/associates or suppliers for a link from their website (with correct anchor text)

2. Looking at where competitors have got their links from and trying to get links from the same places.

3. Writing superb and interesting articles (publsh on places like Ezine) that people will want to use on their blogs etc. (obviously there should be self serving links in the articl / authors biography)

4. Creating a blog (again with compelling content and links). Make sure the blog is part of your domain rather than on a 3rd party domain.

5. Online press release with links - again the quality of the content is crucial to haw many people wil pick it up and run with it.

Hope you liked them… feel free to add some of your own.