MARKETING TIP: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
It’s a competitive world out there when it comes to getting your site seen by others. Everybody wants to be on page one of their chosen search phrase in Google but how do we get there? It’s no easy task and requires a lot of things that work together to help increase your rankings.
Google has a secret algorithm at its core which it uses to rank pages. This algorithm studies many things about your site including, amongst other things, its age, the quality of its content, incoming links from other relevant sites, keywords and other meta tags in its code.
Let’s take a look at a few of these things.
Quality content
This is one of the big ones! It’s in Google's best interest as a search engine to refer you to quality sites the first time. To do this, the robots it sends out to crawl your site look for keyword rich content. If you want to get up in the Google rankings, you must have relevant, quality content on your website’s pages.
Links
You need links – and lots of them. Many people place their websites on free or paid directories. While these do help to a certain extent, the best links you can have are links from other sites which have high page rankings. Most of these will probably be competitors who won’t give you a link from their site, but you will find sites that will.
Meta tags
Close attention should be shown to title, keyword and description meta tags.
Yes, Google looks at the title of your page. Make it descriptive, keyword rich and short (6-8 words). Don’t fill it with keywords and don’t use funky looking characters to make it stand out in bookmarks. Google doesn’t like this.
Keywords are very important. There are many tools on the web which can help you select your keywords. They look at what the most requested keywords are for your category. There is the tendency to put the most requested keywords first, but if your category is competitive and full of people all doing the same as you, maybe it’s a good idea to zag and use slightly lesser requested keywords and get higher in Google for those words. Your call. Either way, keep it to about 50 words.
The desciption tag is another opportunity to use keyword rich text. This also appears below the title when your site appears in search engines. Have your strongest keywords appear early.
Articles and Driving Traffic From Forums
A good way of getting links from relevant sites is to write articles. If you can get these published on industry related websites who are looking for content for their own sites, you can get a link back to your site in the “about the author” credits.
Forums are another good way to drive traffic. Contribute to these communities and you can more often than not place a link to your site in your signature at the bottom. Google doesn’t place a lot of weight on these links but you are still driving traffic to your site and some of this traffic may be qualified business leads.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
You can also get your page up onto early pages through pay-per-click advertising (ie. Google AdWords, Overture, etc.) where the higher you bid, the earlier your ad will show. In Google, these appear down the right side of the page or highlighted at the top. When someone clicks on your link, you pay the amount you have bid. This may or may not be useful to you and can become a costly exercise if not tracked carefully. We recommend this (especially for new websites not listed with Google) but prefer to get up the list organically through other means like links and keywords
Be Careful
Just as Google rewards you for content, they can penalise you for trying to be tricky. If you think of a great trick to get up the list, Google have already thought of it and are ready to penalise you. So forget things like the ‘ol black text on a black background trick and other just like it. It’s not worthwhile.
Search engine optimisation is such a big topic. Much too big for this blog. But we’ve shared a few of the main things for you to consider. Hope this helps.
Google has a secret algorithm at its core which it uses to rank pages. This algorithm studies many things about your site including, amongst other things, its age, the quality of its content, incoming links from other relevant sites, keywords and other meta tags in its code.
Let’s take a look at a few of these things.
Quality content
This is one of the big ones! It’s in Google's best interest as a search engine to refer you to quality sites the first time. To do this, the robots it sends out to crawl your site look for keyword rich content. If you want to get up in the Google rankings, you must have relevant, quality content on your website’s pages.
Links
You need links – and lots of them. Many people place their websites on free or paid directories. While these do help to a certain extent, the best links you can have are links from other sites which have high page rankings. Most of these will probably be competitors who won’t give you a link from their site, but you will find sites that will.
Meta tags
Close attention should be shown to title, keyword and description meta tags.
Yes, Google looks at the title of your page. Make it descriptive, keyword rich and short (6-8 words). Don’t fill it with keywords and don’t use funky looking characters to make it stand out in bookmarks. Google doesn’t like this.
Keywords are very important. There are many tools on the web which can help you select your keywords. They look at what the most requested keywords are for your category. There is the tendency to put the most requested keywords first, but if your category is competitive and full of people all doing the same as you, maybe it’s a good idea to zag and use slightly lesser requested keywords and get higher in Google for those words. Your call. Either way, keep it to about 50 words.
The desciption tag is another opportunity to use keyword rich text. This also appears below the title when your site appears in search engines. Have your strongest keywords appear early.
Articles and Driving Traffic From Forums
A good way of getting links from relevant sites is to write articles. If you can get these published on industry related websites who are looking for content for their own sites, you can get a link back to your site in the “about the author” credits.
Forums are another good way to drive traffic. Contribute to these communities and you can more often than not place a link to your site in your signature at the bottom. Google doesn’t place a lot of weight on these links but you are still driving traffic to your site and some of this traffic may be qualified business leads.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
You can also get your page up onto early pages through pay-per-click advertising (ie. Google AdWords, Overture, etc.) where the higher you bid, the earlier your ad will show. In Google, these appear down the right side of the page or highlighted at the top. When someone clicks on your link, you pay the amount you have bid. This may or may not be useful to you and can become a costly exercise if not tracked carefully. We recommend this (especially for new websites not listed with Google) but prefer to get up the list organically through other means like links and keywords
Be Careful
Just as Google rewards you for content, they can penalise you for trying to be tricky. If you think of a great trick to get up the list, Google have already thought of it and are ready to penalise you. So forget things like the ‘ol black text on a black background trick and other just like it. It’s not worthwhile.
Search engine optimisation is such a big topic. Much too big for this blog. But we’ve shared a few of the main things for you to consider. Hope this helps.
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