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1. Keyword Research
Great SEO always starts with thorough keyword research. There's not much point in working really hard to achieve top positions in search engines for keywords that don't drive much traffic. That said, there is room to develop a strategy that incorporates the 'long tail' keywords, but the point being that there is a strategy behind this and it's important to understand which keywords will only bring a small amount of traffic and which will bring a lot.
There is a good free tool available for keyword research called the Google Keyword Tool. Here you type in a few keyword that you think are relevant to your website and it spits out several more keywords that might be relevant, as well as traffic estimates for each one. You do still need to sift through the data but it allows you to get a good feel for which keywords generate the most traffic, as well as giving you lots of new ideas for other keywords you perhaps had not thought of where there are many people searching.
2. Optimise Your Website Navigation
I would recommend doing a wireframe of your website so that you can clearly see the whole navigation of your site. At this point you should check to see how 'deep' your website goes. Does it have a more horizontal look to it, where even the deepest page is only 2 or 3 clicks away from the home page? Or do some sections of it go very deep with pages that are 5 or more clicks/stages away from the home page?
The ideal situation is that most of the pages should be within 3 clicks of your home page. This makes it more likely that the search engine spiders will be able to crawl your whole site. Play around with your navigation to see what you can do to achieve this balance. Don't worry too much if a few pages go quite deep though, as long as they are not pages that are very important pages.
The other factor involved in optimising your navigation is to ensure that your URLs are keyword rich and do not contain any unnecessary characters. Once you have completed step 3 it is best to come back to this. You will need to name your website's directories and files using the relevant keywords. You should also make sure that you don't leave a space in the file names or this will place the percentage character in your URL, which isn't ideal. And additionally, if your URLs have more than one question mark in them (possibly due to your CMS or because you have a database driven site) then you will need to use a URL re-write.
If you are unsure how to go about this please contact us and we will be happy to provide you with a Search Engine Optimisation quote. Our number is at the top of this page, or please feel free to email us and we'll get straight back to you.
3. Match Your Keywords To The Pages of your Website
Once you have created your extensive keyword list it's time to match up your keywords to your web pages. Use your wireframe to match 2 or 3 keywords to each page. Ideally these keywords should be semantically linked, although on the homepage this might be a little more difficult if you have several different products or services you are talking about.
These will now be the keywords that you are optimising each page for. It is important to take your website on a page by page basis, while at the same time not losing site of the whole.
You should now go back to step 2 and optimise your URLs based on what keywords are relevant for each of those pages. If you must only choose 1 words out of the 2 or 3 keywords for that page, use the keyword that you most want to optimise for, which perhaps might be the keyword that drives the most amount of traffic.
4. Optimise Your Page Titles, Meta Keywords, Meta Description and H1 Tags
The next step is to go into the code of your pages (or you might be able to do this via your CMS) and optimise your meta data. If you're looking at the code you will find this in the section of the page.
- Page Titles - Create unique page titles for each page using your page specific keywords. Make sure these aren't too long and put your brand or company name at the end rather than the beginning. For example:
- Meta keywords - Each page should have a unique combination of meta keywords. These should include your core 2 or 3 page specific keywords plus a few others that are relevant to that page. For example: meta name="keywords" content="seo, search engine optimisation, pipon solutions, pay per click, PPC, search engine optimisation, SEM, SMM, paid search management, google, adwords, london, UK" />
- Meta Description - This is often the description that you will see in the search engines. You should use your core page specific keywords but also make your sentence compelling enough to entice users to click through to your website. Again this should be unique and should describe the content of that specific page. Ideally this should not be more than 165 characters, including spaces. For example:
- H1 Tags - Use your H1 tags wisely. This is what a user will usually see as the title of the page. It's similar to a title in a word document and, as such, there should be only one instance of this. Use your most important, page specific core keyword here. For example:
Link building is a whole topic in itself for SEO so I can't go into the full details here of how to acquire them. However the important thing with link building, that often gets overlooked, is to ensure that you are link building using the appropriate keywords and linking them through to the most relevant page. You don't need to always place links coming into your homepage when you might have another page with more specific product information on it.
An example here might be a clothing website. If your homepage talks about the range of products you do and is geared up to rank for the more generic terms, such as women's clothing etc then you should link build to that page only for those generic terms. Whereas for the deeper pages, such as a page dedicated to women's jeans, should have links coming into it for the keyword women's jeans.
For a very quick and far from comprehensive overview of how to get links, think about some of the following:
- Directory submission, writing and submitting articles to other websites, blogs and article directories, contact any partners or suppliers to ask them for a link from their website, press releases using an online PR site.
As you can see, even with only 5 top tips there is still a fair amount of work involved with SEOing your website. The key thing to take away from this however, is that the most important aspect is keyword research and planning. This forms the corner stone of your SEO strategy.
If you are interested in SEO and would like Pipon to give you a quote please call or email us today. We have SEO packages to suite almost every budget and welcome the opportunity and challenge to work with businesses big and small.
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