Before I explain how you can help your website benefit from search engine optimisation (SEO) I want to make something clear – if you don’t have time to spare then I do not recommend you try doing SEO yourself. This is because SEO takes time to get right which consists of many different elements, e.g Google has over 200 different signals it looks for when ranking websites in its search engine results pages (SERPs). An SEO company such as Weblinx are available to do the SEO work for you so you can concentrate on other tasks for your company. Remember, your website is to help your company grow, by eliminating the need to do any other jobs you are able to spend your time on the main jobs for your business.
So if you think you have the time to spend optimising your website then allow me to welcome you to my post. The aim of the game is to help you get your website on page 1 for your chosen keywords.
Search Engine Optimisation
The aim of search engine optimisation is to ensure your website is search engine friendly. By having the SEO on your website done correctly your website will, in theory, climb up the SERPs. The problem with SEO is that there is no guarantees which means sometimes web masters have to do some guess work as to why their website isn’t doing as well as it should be.
It takes time to get your website on to page 1, especially if your website doesn’t exist in any SERP’s at all, which is why a lot of research has to be made before hand. to get as much work done as possible to show search engines your website is improving. One other thing to bare in mind is that SEO is not a one time thing; meaning websites such as yours will be battling for the positions you have achieved. By stopping any work on your SEO will give other websites a chance to take your newly achieved positions for themselves.
Getting Started
So what can you do for your website to encourage search engines to rank you highly? You’ll be surprised that there isn’t that much you have to do. To begin with you must pick keywords for your website which are certain words that summarise your website as a whole. For example this blog uses keywords such as SEO blog, search engine optimisation and Internet marketing. These words are what will be used to find this blog on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others. By ensuring these keywords are optimised correctly your website will eventually be found on page 1 when queries such as “What is search engine optimisation?” are entered in search engines.
A method I have discovered to help find keywords for your website is using a feature called “Wonder Wheel” found on Google which has only just surfaced recently due to the newly updated design. To use this feature to your advantage you can do the following:
- Enter a keyword relevant to your industry, e.g SEO, into Google and click search.
- Once the search engine results page has loaded click the link named “Wonder Wheel” found in the sidebar found on the left side of the page.
- A diagram similar to a spider will apear with keywords surrouding your chosen keyword. These keywords when clicked will seperate into more keywords.
The advantage using Wonder Wheel is that it allows you to find keywords you may not have come up with yourself which may infact be the keywords you end up using for your website in the end.
Once you have picked the keywords you want to optimise for your website it’s time to decide what information you want to display on your website. The better the content you use on your website the more your site will benefit, especially when your keywords are placed strategically within your content. When search engines crawl your website they will come across the content contained within each of your pages so by ensuring the content you use is relevant to your site search engines are more likely to give your website a better ranking. I recommend creating pages of content ready for your website or even better hiring a copywriter to do the job for you as they have the experience to ensure your site displays only the best information.
Another important requirement you must ensure you meet is creating a linking structure. The better your linking structure the better your website will rank. By splitting your created content into parts you will be able to add different pages to your website for each piece of your content. Each page should be treated individually for certain keywords so they are given an equal amount of exposure which means the content displayed on each page should have designated keywords. It may be a struggle to ensure each page has different keywords but as long as each keyword you have chosen is given a chance at being discovered by search engine bots then your pages should be okay.
Meta Data
When all the pages you require are added to your website you must ensure they have the correct meta data added to them. Meta data is one of the areas search engines use to find information to use when displaying your website on their search engine result pages. Meta data commonly consists of the title, description and keywords. By making sure your chosen keywords are added to these areas you are able to give your keywords even more exposure. Remember, the better you expose your keywords the better your website will rank for those keywords.
The html you want within your website is the following:
<meta name=”description” content=”" />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”" />
Make sure your description for each page contains at least 1 keyword relevant to the title. I find this demonstrates to search engines that the page is all full of relevant information which is exactly what you want.
Concluding
In no way is this the end of optimising your website, this is only the beginning. By using search engines you will be able to find masses and masses of advice on how to optimise your website even more with services such as blogs, press releases, social media, social networking and more. Search engine optimisation may sound complicated but once you have gotten your head around it it will become your friend.
If you have any advice or feedback then please leave a comment, I always try to respond to my comments as soon as fast as possible.
