Ever since I became interested in the Internet, there have always been a hoard of spammers and weight loss ebook sellers and get rich quick schemers who clutter up the net.
The real purpose of the Internet, as I see it, is to provide useful and interesting information in order to assist and improve. Having recently relocated from South Africa to the UK, I have been constantly amazed at the sheer volume of things (transaction, lookups, you name it) that you can do on the internet. In South Africa, you couldnt even send your Mum a gift via Amazon or use Ebay for fear of it being intercepted and not reaching its destination.
The purpose of my rant is that the Internet can be a useful tool if its not cluttered up by all these useless ebooks and ridiculous marketing get rich schemes. As a result, we as SEO professionals have been forced to go the extra mile wrt SEO for websites and its not just a question of adding a couple of meta tags to a website. There are now a myriad of tools, techniques and tests that we have to perform to make it through the pack.
SEO is Vital to your website
SEO is not inherently complex, but requires a great deal of well spent, well directed time and effort. In spite of all this, and it might sound corny and hackneyed, but it really does come down to “Content is King” when you are trying to figure out the crux of SEO. Nothing works as hard for your website than great content, and its not just a short term fix, its for the long haul.
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Whichever industry you are in, it is possible to transform brand image and level of business by promoting your website to the top of Google – and it needn’t break the budget. As Google is by far the most popular search method for products and services in the U.K. Tom Hicks, Cyber-Duck’s SEO expert lists the top 10 necessities for 2010.
1. Do your research – Before you start search engine optimisation it’s vital that you do your research. What are your competitors doing to their sites? What keywords are they using? Who is linking to them? What keywords receive the most searches? These are all vital things to find out prior to your project and will serve you well in the long run. There are plenty of free tools out there which you can use for doing keyword research on a budget.
2. Add meta tags – It might sound like techno-speak but Meta tags are the first thing you should look at when optimising your site. Each page should use ‘Title’ and ‘Description’ tags – bear in mind that each page should be a specialist area of the site for one or two key phrases. These are the phrases you wish to rank well in Google for when someone makes a search.
3. Add a blog to your site (and use it!) – Not only are regularly added blog articles a way of saying to Google that your site is a great source of regular informative content, they are also an excellent method of bringing visitors to the site and getting other sites linking to yours. They also establish your company as an industry expert.
4. Use content to your advantage – Your static page content should primarily be written for the user – you should never write content for the search engine as this can end up looking bad and making your site look like spam. If you have structured your site well, the content will naturally be discussing the keyword(s) assigned to the page and Google will see it as relevant to the theme of the page.
5. Optimise page (URL) names – When initially building your site it is important that you take the names of the pages into consideration for additional SEO benefit. Again sticking to your keyword(s) for each page, keep the names simple, short and hyphenated to make them look as clean as possible. Messy links can quite easily put a user off your site.
building links is 90% of the effort required when optimising your site
6. Write articles – Become an expert in your field and gain links at the same time by writing articles for specialist industry portals and article databases. This will build your brand and your rankings too.
7. Build links – Vital to your success in ranking well. In fact, building links is 90% of the effort required when optimising your site. There are a lot of rules and methods to follow when building links but as a general rule you should always remember that lots of links on relevant, high quality pages are going to get you far. When it comes to links, quality is much better than quantity.
8. Optimise images – Images can be optimised as well as text, making more entrance points to your website. In order to ensure that images are optimised in this way, describe each image in the ‘ALT’ tag.
9. Keep up to date – If you want your site to get to the top and stay there you need to be on top of every new development in the SEO industry. There are often changes to the way Google and other search engines will read sites, and it is clearly very important to know what these things are.
10. Report, compare, change, and improve – Optimising your website is not something you can do and leave. You need to make continuous assessments of how your site is performing and make improvements accordingly. This is often done using a/b tests, which use software to compare the performance of two versions of the same page.
Hi, I took some time to read the article and show it to my girlfriend and I’m quite pleased with how useful and interesting it was. I wish more people actually took the time to write worthwhile posts. Thanks
Hey, thanks for the great article. Honestly, about six months ago I started using the internet and there is so much nonsense out there. I appreciate that you put excellent content out that is clear and well-written. Good luck and thank you for the great tips.
Hi Helen,
Thank you! I couldn’t agree more. All the best.
last few days our class held a similar discussion about this topic and you point out something we haven’t covered yet, thanks.
- Laura