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.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the Internet has helped level the playing field for small businesses around the globe. Unfortunately many small businesses do not have a general marketing budget and therefore cannot afford to spend a lot of money working on their search engine rankings.  Here is a few top tips that can be implemented by small businesses to assist their rankings:

1. CONTENT IS KING

Search engines love content, the more content that you can add to your website the better, an analogy that I like to use is: “fish and a fishing pole - when explaining how text heavy sites often outrank thin ecommerce sites, I like to call searchers fish and each word on the page an additional fishing pole in the water. The more text you have on a website the more searchers you are likely to ‘catch’”.

It is important that the content added to your site is unique, a good idea to increase content is to add a frequently asked questions page which you can update regularly or even better add a blog which you post to on a weekly basis.

2. THE PERSONAL TOUCH

Customers often like the personal touch and opinion. Make your personal knowlege on your subject known, this will help you become an authority in the eyes of a searcher/potential customer. (again using a blog will help here).

3. LOCAL SEARCH IS IMPORTANT

Optimising for local search is crucial. There are many ways to do this, one such way is to incorporate geographical terms in your on-page optimisation (ie. Your city name in the META title and H1 tags). The other thing that is quick and easy to do is register with Google Places, Yahoo Local & Bing Local - this allows people to find your business through the map searches etc.

4. WEBSITE SPEED

As stated in a previous post, Google now incorporates a website’s loading speed in it’s algorithm. Use the tools highlighted in the previous post to check and improve your website’s loading speed.

5. PRESS RELEASE

Write a press release for local online media outlets (and offline). make sure that you have links (with anchor text) back to your website. This can be a crucial help - one of my recent press releases has led to a pitch for one of the countries largest organisations - It can work very well.

 Hope you like these tips…. feel free to add more if you like.