The 7 Key Search Engine Optimization Tasks You Must Do

Transcription

1 The 7 Key Search Engine Optimization Tasks You Must Do In Order To Increase Website Traffic

2 Table Of Contents 1. A Case For Search Engine Optimization 2. The 7 Key Search Engine Optimization Tasks You Must Do 3. Factors That Affect The Search Engine Rankings Of Your Website 4. Search Engine Optimization...It Is Complex 5. Key Task #1 Do What Search Engines Want You To Do 6. Key Task #2 Publish Great Content 7. Key Task #3 Publish Content Regularly 8. Key Task #4 Use Good Long Tail Keywords 9. Key Task #5 Make Page Titles Match Title Tags 10.Key Task #6 Make Page Titles Match Page URLs 11.Key Task #7 Include Page Title Keywords In The Meta Description Tags 12.What Can Search Engine Optimization Do For Your Business? Profitable Sales & Marketing Services Or Your Money Back

3 A Case For Search Engine Optimization Search engine optimization can be very beneficial for any company because it can 1. Dramatically Increase Website Traffic 2. Substantially Increase Leads From A Website 3. Significantly Increase Revenue Generated From A Company's Website Take a look at how significantly search engine optimization increased the website traffic for this particular website. Key Point Search Engine Optimization can dramatically increase a websites traffic, leads it generates and revenue it generates

4 The 7 Key Search Engine Optimization Tasks You Must Do In order to be successful increasing a websites indexed pages, ranking of those pages within search engines and increasing website traffic we have found 7 key activities or tasks that critical to success. These 7 tasks are Key Task #1 Do What Search Engines Want You To Do Key Task #2 Publish Great Content Key Task #3 Publish Content Regularly Key Task #4 Use Good Long Tail Keywords Key Task #5 Make Page Titles Match The Title Meta Tag Key Task #6 Make Page Titles Match Page URLs Key Task #7 Include Page Title Keywords In The Meta Description Tags Key Point If you do not actively work on your website's search engine optimization your website will not see significant gains in traffic. All of these tasks are important. If anyone one task is not completed or completed poorly it will adversely affect the traffic you are able to generate from your website. If these tasks are not completed a website will not see significant website traffic. If completing these tasks look daunting we would be more then happy to help you try and tackle them. If you are interested in doing the work yourself continue reading this report for detailed steps on what to do to increase traffic.

5 Factors That Affect The Search Engine Rankings Of Your Website The factors that affect search engine rankings are constantly changing. That is why it is important to constantly be staying up to date on what those changes are or to have a company who stays up to date on the changes look after your website's ongoing optimization. Although we don't know what the future ranking factors will be we do know the search engines are constantly working to improve the quality of their search results and to make more money. This means that any of the changes to rankings will be done in an effort to either help the search engine make more money or improve the quality of the search results. Below is what is currently the different factors that effect search engine rankings and the weight each factor has on rankings. Again over time this will change as 10 years ago the majority of the weight was on the keyword meta description, the keywords in the article and the amount of links any page had. As you can see, today there are many more factors that were not even considered into the equation just a few years ago. In addition to the below there is one critical ranking factor that probably is the most important. If you want to know what it us contact us. Search Engine Ranking Factors Source: 2011 edition of the Search Engine Ranking Factors Study

6 Search Engine Optimization...It Is Complex Search Engine Optimization is complex. Here are some of the reasons it is such a complex thing 1. Misunderstanding Of What It Is Many people believe search engine advertising is search engine optimization. These are two very different things. Search engine advertising is simply paying to have an ad for your website appear in the search results. If you stop paying to advertise your site you will lose that website traffic. Search engine optimization works to improve your websites organic rankings (not ad rankings) so that you get traffic for basically free. If you stop paying for search engine optimization your website will still appear in search engines. You will still reap some of the benefits of the search engine optimization work after it is done. Search engine ads have a one time benefit. Search engine optimization has a continual benefit. 2. It Is Always Changing It order to do search engine optimization well you will need to know what is changing with search engine algorithms. In addition you will need to know how these algorithm changes will impact your search engine optimization efforts. 3. You Can Be Penalized And Lose Your Rankings If you do things that the search engines feel is cheating, unethical, spammy or just not in the best interest of internet users then there is a good chance your website will be penalized. This penalty will be applied by search engines significantly lowering the rankings of your website or completely removing your website from search results. You need to make sure the things your search engine expert does will not result in a penalty. The last thing you want to have happen when you are trying to increase your website's traffic is to have your website removed from search engines and to get zero search engine traffic. 4. It Is Very Technical Search Engine Optimization deals with things like HTML code, meta descriptions, algorithms, sprite images etc... In order to be successful at search engine optimization you need to understand all the technical terms and be able to know how to implement the technical changes to your website.

7 5. It Requires Experimentation Because the search engines do not tell us exactly how they determine rankings it requires that a website owner be constantly tracking various experiments to determine what is impacting search engine rankings. In other to do this you need sophisticated software and processes to learn how the search engines are changing how they rank websites. 6. Increasing Traffic Is Not Enough It is not enough to simply increase traffic. If you increase traffic of people located in India but you only sell your products to people located in the United States, the traffic increase you are getting is not going to do you much good. Similarly if you only sell to dentists in the United States and you increase website traffic with Optometrists in the United States you will not increase the revenue generated from you website. You need to increase traffic with the right target audience that matches the target audience in your marketing plan. If you don't already have a marketing plan go to our website where you can download a free marketing plan template. 7. Increasing Targeted Traffic Is Not Enough Even if you increase traffic to your website with people who are in your target audience, if you do not convince them to give you their contact information so that you can follow up with them, convince them to contact you or convince them to make a purchase on your website it does no good. If your website traffic is not converting into leads or sales the increased traffic with your target audience is of little to no value to you. Key Points Search Engine Advertising is NOT Search Engine Optimization. In order to be successful at search engine optimization you either need a full time dedicated employee our an agency with expertise in marketing and search engine optimization.

8 Key Task #1 Do What Search Engines Want You To Do In order to be rewarded by the search engine with higher rankings you need to do what the search engines want you to do. If you are doing the opposite of what they want, eventually they will find out and penalize you. They are constantly updating how they show search results to provide a better experience to the end user and to penalize those who don't. If you do things to trick the search engines (like using linking schemes) they will eventually find out and severely penalize you. The things that search engines want you to do are all related to providing their users with a better experience. Here are some of the things search engines want you to do. 1. Make your website load faster No one likes to wait for a page that takes 10 seconds to load. The search engines realize this giving higher rankings to fast loading pages. 2. Using titles that accurately describe the content on the web page. Search engines are trying to answer people's questions. If the title of your web page accurately describes the content this will provide a better user experience and you will be rewarded with higher search rankings. 3. Providing highly valuable content that searchers want to read Search engines want to provide great answers, to provide great answers there needs to be great content. If you provide this great content you will be rewarded. At the end of the day search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will reward sites that help them accomplish their goal of providing good search results their users. If your web pages provide a bad experience or do not contain the content people are looking for, your website will be pushed lower in search engine rankings. Your web pages will be pushed lower to make room for web pages that do a better job of providing what searchers are looking for. Key Points Try to trick the search engines and you will get penalized. Do what search engines want you to and get rewarded with higher rankings.

9 Key Task #2 Publish Great Content Publishing great content gets you higher search engine result rankings because: 1. It is doing what search engines want you to do Search engines want to provide great answers to their users. If you provide great information that can answer questions people are looking for in search engines those pages will be rewarded with higher search engine rankings. 2. It naturally creates traffic and links If you have outstanding and useful content on your website people will send it to their friends and link to it from their own website. The links to your content will get noticed by search engines and they will rank your pages in the search results higher because of it. 3. It naturally creates social media buzz If you have outstanding content people will post it on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+. As discussed on page 5 this is one of the key factors search engines look at when determining how high to rank a page in their search results. Creating great content naturally leads to higher search engine rankings and website traffic. Key Points Great content creates helps search engines, creates links and social media buzz, leading to higher search engine rankings.

10 Key Task #3 Publish Content Regularly The more regularly you post content the higher all of your rankings in search engine search results. This makes sense as a website that is updated and adds new content regularly is probably going to have better information and provide a better user experience to searchers than a website that has not been updated in 5 years. As a result the search engines reward websites that add new content regularity with higher search result rankings for all their pages. For most of our clients we suggest posting a new page to your website at a minimum of once a week. The other benefit of doing this is it will not only get higher rankings for your existing pages but by adding more pages you will get more pages indexed in search engine results. Therefore you will have the additional benefit of showing up in search results more, for more keywords and result in additional traffic from the additional pages you create. All of this while helping the rankings of your main pages. The one caveat is that for this to hold true you need to ensure you are posting high quality content. If you are posting low quality content your website will be penalized by the search engines. The search engines do not want to send traffic to a website that is 90% unhelpful content. To see just how big of an impact posting regular content can have, that a look at the results from a test we conduct. Click here to see the results from the test. Key Points Adding high quality content to your site regularly will increase the search result ranking positions of all your pages. Adding poor quality content regularly to your website will actually penalize your website.

11 Key Task #4 Use Good Long Tail Keywords When choosing what keywords to target you should go after long tail keywords. This is for two reasons 1. 70% of search engine traffic comes from long tail keywords. 2. People that arrive at your site by the means of a long tail keyword search will be more than two times as likely to buy from you than a person who comes to your website by a short tail keyword. Use a keyword tool to generate longer keywords that are 4 to 8 words that you will try to target to rank high for with your website. Use these long tail keywords in your page's URL, page title and meta description. Not sure what a long tail or short tail keyword is. Here are some quick definitions Long Tail Keywords Less searched for, more specific search phrases, usually more than 3 words long. These keywords have less competition so it is easier to rank high in search engines for them. Example: 100 Mbps Fibre Optic Business Internet Connection Short Tail Keywords Very frequently searched for words, that are not very specific search phrases and can often mean multiple things. Usually short tail keywords are 3 words or less. These keywords have more competition so it is harder to rank high in search engines for them. Example: Internet Key Points Long tail keywords account for 70% of all search engine traffic and convert to sales at over double the rate of non long tail keywords.

12 Key Task #5 Make Page Titles Match The Title Meta Tag Making the title shown on your page match the page's meta page title tag will increase the rankings of that page for the given keywords. In the example below the keyword is Marketing Program Features. You will see these words are included in both the page title shown on the page and in the web browser heading. Below is an example of each. Page Title If you were to check the HTML code for this page you will see that it is using the following HTML code <h1> Marketing Program Features</h1> to mark the title displayed on the page as an H1 heading class. You can do this for your own web page either by modifying the code or by making the title an H1 heading in your content management system.

13 Page Title Meta Tag The page title meta tag is what is display in the top of the web browser page when you are viewing that particular page and the title that is displayed in the search results. In the example below the page title is Aweber: Marketing Services & Features. To change the page title for your web page you can do this by either editing the page title for the page within your website's content management system of by editing the <meta name="title" content= place title here > HTML code for the web page. The keywords here should match those display as the title on the page. Key Points Matching on page H1 titles to page title meta tags leads to higher search engine rankings.

14 Key Task #6 Make Page Titles Match Page URLs Another key factor is making sure the keywords you are using in your page's title also appear in the page's URL. The exact same keywords you have in your URL should be some where within your pages title. To ensure you understand what we are referencing we will review what a keyword is, what the page URL is and what the page title is. Keyword The phrase that someone is searching for. In the below example the keyword would be marketing software features. Page URL The page URL is what is displayed in the website address bar of the web browser page when you are viewing that particular page. It is also displayed in search results below the page title as shown below. In the example below the page URL is For most website content management systems the page's URL is auto generated by the title for the page. Just make sure that your content management system does this for you as sometimes they do not.

15 Page Title Meta Tag The page title is what is displayed in the top of the web browser page when you are viewing that particular page and the title that is displayed in the search results. In the example below the page title is Aweber: Marketing Services & Features. To change the page title for your web page you can do this by either editing the page title for the page within your website's content management system of by editing the <meta name="title" content= place title here > HTML code for the web page. This is a relatively easy step but if missed it will severely affect your ability to get good search engine rankings for the given web page. Key Points Matching the keyword(s) found in your web pages title and URL will result in higher search engine rankings for that page for that keyword(s).

16 Key Task #7 Include Page Title Keywords In The Meta Description Tags One of the most important things you can do to rank for a given keyword is to place that keyword in the page title and the meta description. The first step in doing this is understanding what the keyword, page title and meta description title is. If you are not sure what there are here is a quick summary again. Keyword The phrase that someone is searching for. In the below example the keyword would be marketing software. Page Title Meta Tag The page title is what is displayed in the top of the web browser page when you are viewing that particular page and the title that is displayed in the search results. In the example below the page title is Aweber: Marketing Services & Marketing Software Solutions. To change the page title for your web page you can do this by either editing the page title for the page within your website's content management system of by editing the <meta name="title" content= place title here > HTML code for the web page.

17 Meta Description This is the few lines of text in the search results below the page link describing what is on the page. You can see this for the Aweber page in the picture below circled in red. This information can be edited for your web page by either editing the description section for the page within your website's content management system of by editing the <meta name="description" content= place description here > HTML code for the web page. If you ensure the keyword is in the page title and the meta description this is increase your ability to rank of the given keyword you are trying to target. Key Points Including the exact keywords you want to rank for in the page title and in the meta description is one of the most important things you can do to rank for a given keyword.

18 What Can Search Engine Optimization Do For Your Business? So what can search optimization do for your business? If you currently get new customers from your website what would happen if you were able to double or triple the revenue you were able to get from your website? If you don't currently get any revenue from your website how would it impact your business if you were able to generate revenue from your website? Key Points Search Engine Optimization presents a great opportunity to increase revenue from your website. Take advantage of search engine optimization for your business today by either hiring a full time employee or an agency with the marketing and search engine expertise to do it for you.