You’ve thought long and hard about what you’re going to offer the world that no one else can do quite like you. You’ve bought a cool dynamic domain name, roped in your friend to design a website or made one yourself on WordPress, and you’ve even got yourself a stylish logo. Now all you need is for people to see the fruits of your labour and ultimately use your services. Well, this is where SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) comes in.
You want people reading and sharing your blogs or buying products and services from you. Obviously you can shout about it on Twitter and Facebook, send out an email to your friends, families, and contacts, pass out a few business cards with the details of your new website. But one thing you simply must do if you want to succeed is ensure that the SEO basics are covered.
At Digirank we provide SEO services to match many different budgets, but you may still want to look at doing the basics yourself. We thought we’d share some of our knowledge to help you and your site on its way up the Google rankings.
Content
What is SEO?
You may have heard or seen the phrase Search Engine Optimisation or SEO around. You may or may not know that it refers to a number of factors that help make your website more visible to search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing and rank it higher. The higher your webpage ranks, the better for you. Those companies or sites that rank at number 1 in Google are reported to receive 33% of all search traffic.
Search engines use complex algorithms to work out which websites deliver the best information on the search term you typed in. Thankfully, these algorithms are so clever that they are ranking pages which are more useful and relevant to the user higher up. So if your website is useful, user-friendly and full of relevant content then you are already onto a winner. There are a few other simple things that you can do though to give your site a helping hand and get on the right side of the search engine crawlers.
The following is a comprehensive beginner’s guide to SEO, taking you through how to set-up your blog or website so that it’s SEO-friendly.
PREPARATION FOR SEO
You will hopefully know what it is that you are promoting on your website and who you want to promote it to – this is a good start. Now comes the tricky part – matching this to what people actually search for online. You need to think like your target audience – what do they want to know and how would they search for it? At the heart of SEO are these keywords and phrases. Each of the priority pages of your website (those that you most want people to visit) should target between two and three keywords or phrases as well as those terms that naturally relate to these keywords.
How Do I Choose Keywords?
So the first thing you need to know is what keywords you should target and this involves some keyword research:
Keyword Research
STEP ONE
Paper + pen = brainstorm. It’s good to start away from your computer with a good old fashioned brainstorm on pen and paper. If you, like the SEO team at Digirank, are used to spending all your time on a computer this may help you tap unexplored avenues.
STEP TWO
You should now have a hard copy of words and phrases around each of your priority pages that you’ve come up with – add these to a spreadsheet on your computer. Now, you will need to add some ideas from the web. A good and easy way to start is with Google autocomplete – start typing in one of your short keywords into Google and see what suggestions it comes up with. Put these into your spreadsheet too.
This next bit may sound technical but if you follow the steps it is simple – trust me on this. OK – visit a similar website to your own, a competitor’s maybe, and right click on a relevant page on their site. Select ‘View page source’ from the right click menu. Now hold down Ctrl and press F. Next, type in ‘Title’ into the box that appears – it will now take you to the Title Tag within the HTML for that page. If the site has had some SEO work done or been created by a web designer with some SEO knowledge this should contain some of the keywords being targeted to the page. Add these to your list too if you think they are relevant.
Now, have a play around with the following free tools that help you think out of the box when it comes to generating keywords and are based in most cases on what people actually search for.
Ubersuggest
Wordstream
You should now have a long list of both long and short phrases and keywords around each page of your site. The next step is to find out if these will actually get you traffic.
STEP THREE
Go to Google Adwords Free KeywordTool. It looks like this. We’ve highlighted the relevant segments.
Copy and paste between 5 and 10 of your keywords into the box like this:
Broad and Exact Terms Defined
Broad – This lets you know the total search volumes for the keyword, grammatical variations, synonyms, and related words. ‘Broad’ is your keyword phrase in any order, and possibly along with other terms e.g. if your keyword is ‘women’s handbags’, you keyword could also show up for ‘handbags for girls’ or ‘buy ladies handbags’.
Exact – This refers to the search volume for a specific keyword and its close variants. Unlike broad, if the person includes other words in their search then this is not included.
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The Keyword tool will now return you results showing how many people search for that term (both broad and exact as defined above). Repeat this process for all of the keywords in your spreadsheet. It may be a little dull and feel like a chore but this keyword research really will pay dividends in the long run. Take a look through all the information that Adwords returns – you should be able to see the number of searches both exact matches and broad matches for each phrase and term. Make a note of these figures in your spreadsheet. When you’ve gone through them all, select the ones that have good levels of traffic, considering the following points:
Avoid keywords with too much search traffic. Google Adwords tells you about ‘Competition’ but this refers to the number of bids on that keyword for paid search and should only be used as a very general indicator for SEO. It is much better to look at the volume of search traffic. If the keyword or phrase has hundreds and thousands of searches these are usually very competitive and should probably be avoided.
But, make sure there is sufficient traffic to make it worth targeting
And don’t opt for keywords that are too broad
It is important to try and target between two and three keywords for each page and not just one keyword. Map out which keywords you’re targeting to each of your sites pages in a spreadsheet so that you have a clear overview of your site.
BEHIND THE SCENES
WordPress
Whether you’ve roped in a friend to design your site or are having a go yourself, we recommend choosing WordPress and customising one of its many free themes. It’s easy to use and great for SEO with a whole range of useful plugins available for free. When it comes to designing your site, user-experience has to come first. Think about how you would expect and want to navigate around a site and keep this in the forefront of my mind. Google will reward you for it too.
HTML
When it comes to making your website, you need to use HTML. Flash may look, uh, flashy but it can’t be picked up by the crawlers in the same way as HTML. By using HTML, you can ensure that all the behind the scenes SEO stuff is present and correct.
Using Your Keywords
Now that you’ve done all the hard work selecting the keywords that you want to rank for each of your priority pages, it’s time to put them to work. Remember the aim is to focus different keywords to each page – do not target the same word to every page on your site as the crawlers will not know which of the pages is the most relevant.
Copy – Be sure to use your keywords naturally throughout the on-page copy, particularly in the first paragraph. We recommend having at least 300 words of copy on every page. When writing your content, remember that you want to be useful to the user. Even if your goal is to convert them to making a purchase, make sure they are getting all the information they need.
No Stuffing though! - Back in the early days of SEO, keyword cramming was seen as the way to go, using as many keywords as you possibly could on your website. Thankfully things have moved on. If you shove as many keywords into your site’s copy as you can, they will add no value and are more likely to get your site penalised.
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You need to make sure that the keywords you are targeting for that specific page appear in the page’s Title Tag, Headers, Meta Description, Image Alt as well as in the copy itself. Now don’t be put off if you don’t understand much of that last sentence. It may sound complicated but in the main these refer to important parts of the HTML code that sits behind your website. The good news is that you can get a WordPress Plugin that allows you to set all of these without any difficulty. The WordPress SEO Plugin from Yoast is the best we’ve found. Simply download the plugin and activate it. Once you have activated it, you should then be able to go in and add the following descriptions in with ease:
Title Tag – This is the most important so make sure you get this right – these are what you see on the browser tabs. Use your keyword(s) at the start of this 70 character summary of the page (don’t go over as Google doesn’t see beyond 70). Put your brand name at the end of the Title Tag. The best format is the following:
Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand
e.g. Adventure tours Kashmir – group travel Kashmir for travellers| Clash Tours.
Header Tags – Use your keyword(s) in the Header Tags – these are basically smaller sub-headings that help break up the page into manageable sections E.g. Adventure Tours Kashmir.
Meta Descriptions – These are the descriptions of the page’s content that usually gets pulled through into the search engine results page. They should be between 150 and 160 characters long and make people want to click through. Although Google doesn’t always choose to display your meta descriptions, you can think of them as a free advert for your site so it’s important they are well-written and include call-to-actions.
Image Alt - Use your keyword(s) in the Image Alt tag – again, don’t worry your WordPress SEO Plugin from Yoast Plugin does this for you. Also Karen has written a great guide here with everything you need to know about Image Alt Tags.
Links Between Pages
Internal links based on providing the best user experience are a great idea. If these links between pages on your site make sense to a user, they will also make sense to a search engine crawler. For example, if you write a blog about a band you love then link at the bottom to a blog you’ve written about a similar-sounding band. If you are launching an adventure holiday tour company in Kashmir then put in a link to other adventure trips that you offer in Asia. Think of yourself as a person visiting your site for the first time– what else would be relevant to you?
If your new adventure tour is launching, why not link to a blog about the ’10 Essential Travel Items for an Adventure Trip’? If you sell handmade handbags, why not link to a page about how you source your materials?
As well as these relevant associated links, you should also link back to a hubpage – the homepage for the section of the site. Google likes to see unique variations around a keyword like Homemade Handbags which is a variation of Handbags which is a subsection of Women’s Fashion Accessories. If you can add links into your copy to show Google that this is the logical structure of your site it will certainly like you for it.
Google +
Google+ is great for a number of reasons, in particular as a networking platform and for Google Authorship. When you set up your Google+ profile include your website in the ‘Contributes To’ section. This means that your profile picture will accompany any of your listings that appear in search results – people are more likely to click through when there is a little picture of your face accompanying it. For plenty more Google Plus information and tips, check out this Digirank blog.
Once you have completed the above, the foundations for your SEO project have been laid and you are ready to start your ongoing optimisation work.
FIRST ACT
Start A Blog
Updating your site with fresh content on a regular basis is an SEO essential. Blogs are the best way of doing this. It is important to identify a clear purpose for each blog post and ensure it is useful to your audience. What do they want to know about it? What would be most useful to them? They are also a great way to target what we call long-tail keyword terms. For example, you may have a dance music bog that targets ‘dance music’ as a keyword but in the course of your keyword research you noticed that there was a small amount of decent low-competition traffic around the term Bristol Dubstep. You can use your blog to target people searching for this phrase. Blogs should be at least 400 words in length.
Make your blog fully shareable across the most relevant social media and bookmarking platforms. Use a WordPress Plugin to add social sharing buttons to each of your blog posts so that people can easily share and recommend your good work.
You should also share it yourself by copying and pasting the link to your blog onto a selection of social media platforms and social bookmarking sites. Be sure to tailor the presentation of each link accordingly taking into account: Who is your audience? What interests them? How do you get them to click on the link?
Here is a selection of the bigger social sites that you should definitely use. There are many more and the number is growing daily so you should experiment with some of the others too:
Twitter – Check out our guide here
Facebook
Pinterest – Check out our guide here
LinkedIn
Stumble Upon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Network with people via social media, chat with them, answer questions and you will find that your content will get spread naturally and people will link to it which is fantastic for SEO. Natural, genuine backlinks to your site is one of the most important ranking factors.
Online Directories
Go through local online directories that serve your area and add your website details including the URL using your brand name as the anchor text. If these directories are legitimate then Google will see these links as an endorsement of your site and give it a boost up the rankings as well as allowing local people to access your contact details.
Link Recommendations
One of the most important ranking factors is the number of recommendations that your site gets from other sites in your sector. These recommendations come in the form of links – think of a link on a relevant website as like Sir Paul McCartney giving you a double-thumbs up but cooler. So spend some time outreaching to other sites in your field, comment on their blogs, Tweet them, engage with them online in the hope that they will know your name and eventually link to you. Developing a genuine relationship with another company or individual takes time and effort but it is worth it in the long run.
Measure for Measure
It is important to monitor your site’s performance on a regular basis so you get a feel for how well it’s doing, what’s working and what’s not. How you gather and react to this information is key to any SEO campaign and in turn your success. This is a very brief overview but if you want to get the most out of SEO, it is vital to read up and get to grips with all the information available out there. Google is the place to start with measuring performance.
Analyse This
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to measure a myriad of different things in relation to the performance of your site, in particular examining the behaviours of those people that visit it. Google Analytics is a bottomless pit of useful information around traffic and can be more than a little overwhelming for a first timer. It is however vitally important you set it up so that you can look at the quantity and quality of traffic, referrals and what people do once they are on the site. It can be customised to fit a range of different monitoring and reporting purposes. It’s easy to judge your site’s performance by hits but it’s also a mistake – it is much better to look at the other metrics available.
Spend some time familiarising yourself with the basic metrics, in particular examine what pages perform well, what people searched for to take them to your site, how long they spent there, how many pages did they look at on their visit, where they are located geographically. The list is pretty much endless. If you find a page isn’t performing well then think about how you can fix it and, conversely, if a page is working well then make sure you take the best aspects from it. For more information on Google Analytics then look no further than their own getting started guide which takes you through the set-up process.
Webmaster Tools
Just like Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools is another great free tool from Google that provides useful information regarding any technical errors your site may have as well as on Impressions and Search. Webmaster Tools flags up any errors that it comes across with your site like 404s errors which are when URLs are simply not found. If you have too many technical errors on your site then Google will take this into account when ranking you. As your site is new you should submit it to Google to make sure it crawls and indexes it – you can do that here in Webmaster Tools.
CHECKLIST
KEYWORD RESEARCH
KEYWORDS IN ON PAGE COPY
KEYWORDS IN HTML TAGS
LOGICAL LINKS BETWEEN PAGES
REGULAR BLOG POSTS
SOCIAL MEDIA SHARING
SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKING
DIRECTORIES & LINK BUILDING
MONITOR
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
SEO is an ongoing process and one that constantly evolves. We have touched on the basics but there is so much more you can do and have to do on an ongoing basis to ensure your site performs well. Keep up to date with developments on our blog and remember to think of your audience and the user-experience first and foremost. Producing regular content that is useful to the reader, interesting and engaging is essential.
How Digirank Can Help You
That’s the SEO basics covered for you. Please bear in mind that SEO takes time and needs to be integrated with a targeted content marketing campaign, it is not something that happens overnight but it does work. If you want a professional fully-dynamic service from SEO and content specialists then give Digirank a call on 0117 923 9726 or fill out this form for a free website review. We are also experts in PPC which is a great way to generate traffic and give your SEO time to get to work.