Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) A step by step guide. Get seen in the search engines

Transcription

1 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) A step by step guide. Get seen in the search engines

2 Table of Contents Google facts and figures 3 Choosing a URL 3 Getting your site listed in Google 3 Announcing you ve arrived 4 Keywords and key phrases 4 Getting the code right 5 Getting the on-page content right 6 Keyword density 6 Alt text on images 7 See what Google sees... 7 Make your site interesting and useful 7 Link building - free directories 8 Join the conversation 9 Open a Google account 9 Should you pay for SEO? 10 Invest your time 10

3 Search Engine Optimisation Google facts and figures (Nov 2011) Google now accounts for something like 88% of all searches on the web. 84% of searchers never look beyond page 2 of the search results. Searchers are 72% more likely to look at the natural organic results than Pay Per Click ads, in fact two thirds of people never click on an ad at all saw a 15% year-onyear growth in ecommerce sales with 83% of shoppers under 35 years old. So it makes sense to invest time in following a few rules to optimise your site and work at getting it on the first page or two of Google s search results for relevant search strings. For more information about Pay Per Click see page 10. GOOGLE Choosing a URL Certain website addresses are more search engine friendly than others. Logodesign.co.uk says exactly what it does on the tin, and also that we are a UK company. If you want to set up a logo design company on the web you will need to find a new name that hasn t already been taken but which still describes what you do. Hyphens are good at separating words in URLs and so logo-design-plymouth.co.uk would be a good choice because people and search engines can understand precisely what you do and precisely where you do it. Getting your site listed in Google Getting into Google isn t that difficult if you work on it regularly and follow certain rules described in this manual. But always bear in mind that you need to communicate effectively to your human visitors and this should not be at the expense of talking to search engine robots! Bear in mind that Google likes sites that have been around for a while, that have lots of relevant content and are regularly changed and updated. If you are starting a new site from scratch, it is useful to have a holding page on the web for Google to index while your site is being built. This should have proper metatags and keywordrich relevant copy. 3

4 Search Engine Optimisation Announcing you ve arrived When your new website is first set up we submit your URL to the top Search Engines such as Google and Bing (was MSN) so that they are aware of your site and will visit it from time to time to index its contents. Submitting your site to these search engines only needs doing once, beware of businesses offering to Submit Your Site to 10,000 Search Engines because this is likely to be money down the drain and you may even get it marked down by the large search engines if they think you are spamming them. Keywords and key phrases Keywords and key phrases are the words that you expect people will type into a search engine when they are looking for a site like yours. So a plumber may list keywords and phrases like plumber, heating engineer, ventilation, boilers, central heating, burst pipes, leaking pipes, emergency call outs and so on. If he is a specialist then his key words will reflect that like ventilation, ducting, air conditioning, air con. If you live in Plymouth you have no interest in plumbers in Portsmouth or Petersfield. So the name of your town or the area you cover may be a very important keyword or key phrase to include. So our plumber may add to his list Plymouth, South Devon, East Cornwall or, if he covers a small area he may choose central Plymouth, Plymouth Hoe, Plymouth Barbican. Getting your list of keywords and phrases right is crucial because they are what search engines are going to use to match your site with people who are searching for a business or service like yours. It is best to concentrate on no more than 3 keywords or phrases per page and use your main ones in the title tag. BURST PIPES EAST CORNWALL AIR CON PLYMOUTH ENGINEER HEATING ENGINEER SOUTH DEVON BARBICAN BOILERS PLUMBERS EMERGENCY CALL OUTS VENTILATION AIR CONDITIONING DUCTING GET LISTED 4

5 Getting the code right Your new website has been engineered by Logo Design with several search engine friendly features. The most important of these concerns the meta tags which are hidden from view in the code for each page and these are the first thing a search engine looks at. If you have a CMS (content management system) you will be able to enter the following meta tag information. The Title tag is the most important, it appears along the top of the browser window, as well as in the results of Search Engines, and should tell the visitor and importantly search engine robots what that page is about. The Title tag for your home page is crucial and should be used to display the name of your business, the main focus/es & the location/s (if appropriate) that your business covers. We Logolaunch CMS is a simple Content Managed Systems for businesses Currently 64 characters long (70 recommended) Logolaunch is a content management system that enables you to control the contents of your website. It s simple to use and you can add, update and change content from anywhere in the world. Currently 157 characters long (160 recommended) recommend that your titile tag length is about 70 characters (including spaces) as if it is any longer it will be cut off when diplayed. Use File > Properties in Word to check your character count. Try and include your keywords and key phrases in your Title. So our plumber may use: Peter & Sons plumbers, heating and boiler engineers, Plymouth (61 characters and spaces) but how many people are going to look for him by his company name? Perhaps General plumbers, heating and boiler engineers in Plymouth area may catch more searches. Make sure that the Title you create for your page accuratly describes what your page is about and is unique for every page on your website. The Description tag is next and it allows up to 160 characters and spaces for you to go into more detail about the content of your page. Just like your Page Title, you must make sure the description is a relevant summary of the page & is informative, but also make it interesting. Our plumber s Description tag could be: Peter & Sons are long established general plumbers covering Plymouth, East Cornwall and South West Devon. We install central heating systems and boilers including servicing and repairs. Emergency call outs for fast repairs of leaks and burst pipes. This is reinforcing his main key words and incorporates some new ones as well. If possible make your description meta tag a call to action. Search engines will look for a site map on your website and we can use scripts to automatically generate and update XML site maps which search engines will use to find their way around all your content. Logo Design built websites with page names in English avoid using gobbledegook code which you will see on some sites. This is meaningless to man and bots alike! 5

6 Search Engine Optimisation Getting the on-page content right After reading your meta tags, the first page Google s robot will look at is your Home Page. It will look at the largest type towards the top of the page to tell it what the page (and indeed the whole site) is mainly about. Your website will have been set up with a range of type styles for your main headings, sub headings and so on. Heading 1 is the strongest of these and it has an invisible H1 tag which tells the robot that this is a main heading and therefore it is likely to contain important information about the site. So if you just have a heading saying Welcome you are wasting a valuable opportunity. Welcome to Peter & Son Plumbers and heating engineers is a lot better. The robot will then look for any sub headings with H2 tag coding. Our wily plumber has devoted a short introductory sentence to each of his services, each starting with an H2 sub heading: Central heating installations, Boiler servicing and repairs, Emergency 24 hour call outs As the robot works its way around the page it will follow any links to further information. Although Peter & Sons have separate pages on their site for each of their services that are reached by the top level navigation buttons they have also made each of their introduction sub headings link to those pages. This will be helpful to human visitors as well as robots: if you want a plumber when you have a leaking pipe in the middle of the night you don t want to be searching around wasting precious minutes to find the page with his emergency call out number on it. Keyword density The secret of writing good copy for websites is to write it for your human visitors in mind first and then to check it over to ensure that a search engine robot is going to make good sense of it too. Keyword density plays a part in how well a site is optimised. Your prime keywords & keyword phrases should, if possible, appear at least two or three times on your home page but should only take up 3% - 5% of that copy. Have a look at your competitors websites, the ones that appear high up Google s ranking for your chosen keywords. Spy on your competitors meta tags: visit their site and click View > Source (or Page Source) in your browser s toolbar to see their code (in Firefox it s Tools>web developer>page source). Their meta tags will be near the top of the code. Use www. keywordspy.co.uk to find out the popularity (and Pay Per Click cost) of keywords and phrases. 6

7 Alt text on images Happy robot waving at camera There is one other meta tag that you should add, the Alt Text tag which is entered into the image property box that is called up when you insert an image or a photograph into a page. Alt or Alternative text is used if your image is unable to be displayed & by browsers to describe pictures to people with impaired sight. It also tells blind search engine robots what pictures are about, so a few words describing your images are doubly worthwhile. It is also useful to give your image files suitable names with relevant keywords to what the image is of. See what Google sees... To see what a search engine has captured and stored for any search string click on the Cached link in Yahoo results or, in Google and Bing, click on the downward facing green arrow next to any URL in the search results and click on the word Cached. This will show you a snapshot of what the search engine recorded last time it visited the site, the time and date of the visit. Make your site interesting and useful The original essence of Google s ranking criteria was based on the fact that interesting sites which people found useful would be signposted on other websites and so the number of sites linking to a particular site would be a strong measure of its popularity. Let the people do the voting, inbound links to your site are, in effect, recommendations that your site is worth visiting. The greater the number of links, the more important the site must be. Google measures this by giving pages a Page Rank from 0 to 10. That was the original idea anyway but then everyone started adding links everywhere using spurious directories, link farms and link swapping programmes. Today Google uses over 200 different factors in its search algorithm apart from the number of inbound links a site has. It is good practice to have quality content that you regualrly update to keep the Site fresh, that is easy to read with no spelling or grammatical errors. To check on the Page Rank (PR) of any website visit - over time a well optimised website should achieve PR4 or even PR5. 7

8 Search Engine Optimisation Link building free directories Some directories are free, some want to get your address to send you marketing s (set up a Hotmail account especially to receive these) and some are genuinely there to be helpful like local directories and specialist trade directories. The latter are the best to seek out and get listed on. To help you supply the information they will ask for be prepared by having a Word document where you have written a number of descriptions of your site of varying lengths, and put a note by each of them with how many characters and spaces they contain (use Edit Properties Statistics in Word to find this out) and try and ensure your keywords and key phrases are featured. To check on the names and number of inbound links to your site (and on your competitors sites) use Link building free directories Xom Reviews About Us FreeIndex Hot Frog Gumtree Global Brown Book 1st Directory My Directory Live Linkedin Professional on the Web

9 Search Engine Optimisation Join the conversation If you have great content on your website that is interesting and useful and if you keep it topical and relevant to your subject or specialism, then you are half way there and people will want to recommend you and your website. If you are a plumber you will have lots of interesting facts and figures about new energy saving boilers, insulation and grants. You will no doubt have some useful hints and tips (how to change a washer in a tap?) and I bet you have some stories and experiences which would have us wetting ourselves laughing. Start a blog (it s easy with content management) to let people know what is happening in your world. Logo can intergrate a blog into your website for an additional charge. Just be certain you have the dedication to keep it up before you start. Join a few forums and contribute honest, considered and useful information. Network and mingle on the web just as you would at a business or social event. Be charming, witty, knowledgeable and fascinating and, just once in a while, let people know where they can find out more about your subject: on your website. Some businesses, clubs and organisations may benefit from an active presence on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook whilst professions and service businesses will favour sites like Linkedin and Digg but only if the time spent can be seen to reap rewards (we re dubious about the value of social networking for B2B webmasters). Social Networking doesn t directly influence SEO but it is still good practice to get your Site seen. Open a Google account If you haven t already done so (it is necessary before we can set up your website with Google Analytics for you to be able to monitor your visitors) open a free Google Account. This will enable you to sign up for things like Adwords (Google s Pay Per Click ads) Adsense (earn money from other people s ads on your site) and, most useful of all, Google Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools will help you analyse and improve your website and your SEO campaign. 9

10 Should you pay for SEO? SEO Search Engine Optimisation - is a vast business with good, bad and downright shady players all vying for your business (and your money). There is also a phenomenal amount of rubbish being written about SEO much of which originates in the States. Before spending any money with an SEO company we recommend you invest a modest amount on a couple of extremely useful books about the subject, namely Get to the Top on Google by David Viney and Get to #1 on Google by Ben Norman. The latter will also show you how to use the free SEO tools at If you decide that it will be a commercially worthwhile investment to spend money with a specialist SEO company try searching for SEO companies or similar on Google. All the good companies will be on the first two pages. The bulk of their fees should go towards buying both permanent and short term links. Top quality links may cost up to 15 each per month! Don t be fooled by companies offering thousands of links, articles, reviews and blog entries for a few hundred pounds - you will be wasting your money. Getting your own site recognised and ranked in the major search engines doesn t happen overnight, it s a long and steady process. And once you are where you want to be (high on page one or page two) you will need to keep up the good work or else slowly, but surely, you will slip back into the murky depths where few people ever go. Invest your time With your content management system it is down to you to keep your site up to date and relevant. Just as turnover is vanity but profit is sanity in business, it is probably more important to have fewer relevant visitors than it is to have loads of tyre kickers. But who ever visits your site, they will not be impressed to see Latest News that is months out of date, or Page Under Construction. Your website, built by Logo Design, gives you the tools to reach and communicate with your target market in ways that until recently were unavailable to all but the largest and wealthiest movers and shakers on the web. We hope you have found the information in this manual useful and that, by following its advice, you reap the rewards of your efforts. Good luck! 10

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