Search Engine Optimisation - 101

So you need to do optimise your website for search engines, but where do you start? In this article I will give you a simple process that you can follow to do search engine optimisation.

1. Select your keywords

You might think this is the wrong way around. Why should you start with your keywords. Well, the answer is quite simple. You want to work towards a specific goal. And the goal is to rank very high on a specific keywords or phrases in Search Engines. If you create a site, that never even mention these keywords, it is going to be quite difficult to get any rankings for those keywords. It is possible, but it will probably cost you a lot more time and money than you might want to spend.

One way to find you keywords is by identifying your competitors and identify the keywords they are using. Use the website www.googspy.com to help you with this. Enter your competitor site into the provided field, and in the free version you will see a list of the top 10 keywords they rank on.

Another option is to use the Google AdWords tool. No need to spend any money on this, but it is a great way to identify your main keywords and additional keywords. Use the Keyword Estimation tool inside AdWords, which will show you how many visitors you might receive. Just remember this is an estimate if you use the AdWords system, so you should be able to get a lot more visitors than estimated.

2. Decide on your domains name and URL.

Yes only now you might be able to decide on a domain name and exactly how you will structure your web site's site map. By including your main keywords in your domain and URLs search engine will pick up these keywords and consider these keywords as important phrases for your site, but please remember, your site structure should still be logical and your customers should still be able to navigate with ease. So instead of creating a page called, http://www.example.com/product123.htm, place it in a more descriptive directory structure, e.g. http://www.example.com/buy/Computers/IBM/Product_A_Range_B.htm With any luck, you might be able to rank just a bit higher if someone search for the keywords "buy IBM A B".

3. Create a page for each Keyword or phrase and optimise for it.

You need content on your site, and take into account your keywords and URLs you might want to use. Create pages specifically for the selected keywords and phrases. Include the keywords in the Title Tags, Heading tags, and anywhere else it seems natural, but be careful not to spam your pages (including the keywords too many times, and making it difficult to read for a person). Remember, your customer still need to read your web page, and hopefully buy / subscribe to whatever you are selling or promoting.

4. Links Text

Search engines use links to determine how important a website or page is for a specific set of keywords. Create links between your pages to which will direct both your customers and search engines to your pages, and include the allocated keywords in the link for the specific page. Using our previous example, you might want to include a link from your home page to you IBM product A page, which the text "But IBM A B now..."

5. External Links

Search Engines use a voting system to determine the importance of websites and pages on the web. The more pages you have pointing to your products page, the more votes that page will receive. That is why we used our internal links to point to the different pages. However, you still need external links to do exactly the same. Get as many inbound links to your website, and keep your out going links to a minimum. That way pages on the Internet will "vote" for your page, increasing its importance. Please remember to include your keywords in the inbound links.

But be careful. Do not use link exchange sites. By linking back to the site that is linking to you, you will lose that vote, or even worse, give that site a higher vote than what you received.

Summary

Hopefully, this article will give you a quick overview of how you can start with Search Engine Optimisation of your site. Search Engine Optimisation is not a one time only process. You will have to keep updating your site on a regular basis, to make sure you are tops of all of your keywords.

Add Comments