Welcome back for the second instalment of understanding SEO. In part one we covered what search engines are and how they work. In part two we are going to look at the on page factors which matter most when it comes to optimising your site. So, go put the kettle on, sit back and have a browse through these 7 important pointers.
1. What are Keyword phrases?
Long, long ago (well in the late nineties) search engines used to rely heavily on keywords and ‘Keyword phrases’ (the words and phrases that potential customer might use to search for your website) to decide whether a website was relevant for a certain search criteria. Of course it wasn’t long before business’s started exploiting the power of keywords for commercial gains; often listing hundreds of keywords that weren’t relevant to their site at all in order to attract more traffic… Google and the other major search engine’s responded and introduced many other factors which effect ranking, ultimately reducing the weight of keywords when deeming whether a site is relevant to a users search.
So does this mean that keywords don’t matter any more? Well although the weight of keywords and phrases has been dramatically reduced, it is still important to pick the right words and phrases as these words set the tone for the rest of your SEO campaign. Selecting the right words and phrases can make a significant difference to the success of your campaign, and as such careful consideration should be given to each and every one.
2. How to choose keywords and phrases
So how should one go about selecting those all important keywords and keyphrases? In all honesty, I could write a book on how best to do this and I still wouldn’t have covered everything that needs to be considered when choosing keywords. We can start off with some basics though. Firstly we need to establish which keywords and phrases are relevant to your business. A great way of doing this is to write out your mission statement so that someone who isn’t familiar with your business can understand what you do and how you intend to do it. For instance this is an adjusted version of Pxl8’s mission statement:
“We are a Birmingham based web design and online marketing agency who build beautifully simple, performance orientated websites, crafted with users in mind. Every site we build has a clear end goal, whether that be a sign up, enquiry or a sale while striving to make our technology integrate seamlessly with your business so your business can grow. All of our websites and marketing strategies are economical, efficient, durable, flexible and allow the organisation to respond rapidly to both market and consumer needs.”
Now, looking through that statement you can see several words and phrases that are central to our organisation; Birmingham based, web design, online marketing, integrated technology, performance orientated etc. What we then do is brainstorm these words to develop multiple phrases, which are associated with the same word or phrase. For example if we take ‘web design’ we could also have website design, custom web design, small business website design, seo web design, web design uk, website design services, ecommerce site design, flash site design etc.
Eventually you will have a long list of possible keywords, however odds are that for many of the phrases you’ve thought of hundred’s of other organisations have thought of the same and optimised their site accordingly. This is where the science of SEO comes in as we need to use some tools to establish the amount of searches these keywords and keyphrases get, and the amount of competition there is around these words and phrases. There are many tools out there, two of the most popular ones are google’s free keyword tool and wordtracker. I won’t go into detail here about the pro’s and con’s of each tool (I’ll save that for another post) but suffice to say they offer slightly different approaches to looking at the same data, using different metrics to assess the popularity and competitiveness of keyword phrases.
After plugging in your data you will see that most keywords are very competitive (especially the good ones)… if your lucky there might be a few diamonds in the rough but if not don’t despair, both of these tools have functions to suggest other possible keyword phrases. What your looking for is much the same as what you look for when your marketing an offline product… niche’s or opportunities in the market, which brings me neatly onto my next pointer.
3. The importance of keyword target audiences
Just like an offline marketing campaign, online optimisation should be appealing to certain target audiences in order to of attract business. This is because it is a lot more effective to concentrate your efforts on a select group of individuals and ensuring you appeal to them, than trying to focus on everyone and appealing to no one. Being aware of target audiences is very important when it comes to selecting keywords and phrases, for instance on the simplest level if your keywords include a lot of technical words, then the people who are typing in those search terms are likely to be techy people, and as a result your website needs to have enough technical information to appeal to that kind of user.
Target audiences can also help you generate keywords you might not have thought of before. For example say I was selling baby cot’s, a quick search through google analytics or wordtracker shows me that all the keywords related to baby cots are extremely competitive. However, thinking outside the box a little, I look at who are the most likely consumers of baby cots. Well its not going to be people who have already had their child as they would have bought this already. It is most likely going to be prospective parents and grandparents so they are my target audience. Another quick search to look at this target audience’s browsing patterns and low and behold it turns out lots of prospective parents look at baby names. I can then create a simple page on my site listing baby names and their meanings whilst having clear links through to my shop to purchase baby cots. Suddenly I’ve found a way into this very competitive market.
4. Why it pays to have clean coding
It’s no mystery that search engines love clean well-coded and structured pages. Always ensure that your web designer has built your pages without any coding errors or mistakes. Don’t worry, I’m not saying you should go through all the code yourself, just make sure you get a firm guarantee that the pages of your site are clean, lightweight, and have a proper content structure. The search pages will reward your site with higher rankings as a result.
5. Image Alt tags
An important part of site optimisation, optimising images can often be overlooked, however the Alt attribute is a critical step. So what do the search engines suggest we do with our images? Google’s webmaster guidelines state:
“Images: Use the alt attribute to provide descriptive text. In addition, we recommend using a human-readable caption and descriptive text around the image.”
Why do they ask us to do this? Well the aim is to provide the same functional information that a visual user would see. This is because search engine have the same problem as visually impaired users – they can’t see images.
This does not mean however that this should be used as an opportunity to stuff your images with keywords… this will in most cases merely trigger spam filters on most search engines. What we need then is a logical file name that reinforces the keywords that we are using on the page, as well as locating the image next to text that is relevant to that image.
6. Sitemap and breadcrumb navigation
For reasons much the same as why it is important to have clean coding, having a sitemap allows the search engines spiders to crawl and structure your site much more effectively and you could rank higher as a result.
Breadcrumb navigation is a way of guiding users (and spiders) around your site, allowing them to see where they’ve just been and how they got there. The term no doubt refers to the story of Hansel and Grettel and it works in much the same principle… apart there aren’t any crows to eat the crumbs! This isn’t a necessity however it is worth including as it is a good functionality feature to have included on your site, especially if it has a lot of pages to it.
7. Relevant, compelling, fresh content
I’ve left the most important pointer till last. Always remember that whilst search engines are ranking your site on a number of different metrics, there is no substitute for relevant compelling and fresh content. Good copywriting involves a good writing style, inclusion of keywords and an end goal… an enquiry, sign up or sale. You can do this yourself or you can hire a specialised web copywriter who is trained in writing content optimised for the web. Either way, having well written web content is a winner on all accounts.
Well, that concludes part two, hopefully by now you should have an understanding of SEO and picked up some ways you can optimise your site better than your competitors for free. Alternatively if you’d rather a professional handled the optimisation of your site, Pxl8 are always on hand to provide expert advice and help your business get the results it deserves.