The Road to Better SEO
The Road to better SEO can be a long and windy road, sometimes a road that requires you to take your time around every corner. Here are some suggestions that have proven useful when optimizing websites for my own clients.
Web copy
Web copy refers to the text on your website. Because content is king in the world of search engines, your keyword phrases need to be placed strategically on your webpage to convince the search engines that your content is highly relevant to those keywords. The more prominent they are, the better. Keep in mind that customers come first, so make sure your copy also reads well. You can hire a freelance writer to help you with copy. I have a few friends who are good writers, may I suggest Matt Andrews or Patricia Reynolds.
Here’s how you can increase the prominence of your keywords:
- Place your keywords in headings, preferably at the beginning of the heading
- Include keywords towards the top of the page
- Bold or italicise keywords where appropriate
- Instead of having a link to another page that says ‘Click here to read more’, word the link to include your keywords, e.g. ‘Read more about our vehicle fleet financing’.
An important tip is to also include these keywords in your HTML title tag. Use your content management system to make these changes yourself, or ask your web developer to guide you if you’re unsure how. If your website is not dynamic in nature then you may have to ask your web designer to do this for you.
Once you have fine-tuned your home page, consider adding new content such as detailed descriptions of what you offer, FAQs and informative articles about your products and services. If you don’t want to write these yourself, they can be located for free on the internet – do a search for ‘articles directory’ or have a freelance writer help you.
It’s also important to bear in mind that search engines can only read text, not pictures. Often web developers embed words in images to look better for website visitors or use Flash for animation, but this is a major impediment to search engines. Some web designers or should I say, graphics artists, design an entire website out of an image thus defeating the purpose of having a website. Images are not searchable. The “alt” tags in an image usually are not watched by the search engines anymore. Alt tags are just for usability anymore.
Linking
Each link from another website to your website (not from your website) is considered by search engines as a vote of popularity for your business and will improve your rankings.
With links the game is quality, not quantity. The other websites should be relevant to your industry and preferably highly regarded themselves. Ten quality links count far more than 500 links from arbitrary websites. In the same way your personal business network can have a significant impact on the success of your business, so too can the online network you build on the internet.
Brainstorm all the relevant websites that you would like to link to you, such as non-competing companies, industry bodies and organisations. Write a friendly email to each describing the benefit their visitors would get from knowing about your business and request that they create a link to your website. Most people will not respond the first time round, so a follow-up phone call is usually required. Suggest this article to them so they can get on the road to better SEO as well.
URLs
Search engines used to base relevance on the URL (ie. http://yoursite.com/relevant-link.html). You will notice that some websites you visit have a unique page URL and others just a series of characters. Google does not rate relevance on URL naming much anymore though I have noticed that it could help in the event of a tie between 2 closely optimized websites. Some less popular but still important search engines use URL naming. My recommendation would be to name your URL’s accordingly so that at the very least if a viewer was to copy the URL and save it he/she would be able to tell where they were if they did not have the page title to look at.
How do I monitor my results?
Monitor your rankings in Google over the next few months by typing your chosen keywords into the search box and recording where your business ranks in the search results.
You should also keep a record of how many visitors your site gets, and more importantly, what search terms they are using to find your website. If you don’t have a reliable statistics package that monitors the hits to your website, speak to your web developer about installing one. I provide my clients with a comprehensive tracking system that provides them with data to base their adjustments off of.
The above process can be also be repeated for each page of your website. Remember to keep updating your content and try to continually increase the number of links to your website.
As you see your rankings climb, you should see a corresponding increase in web traffic and a substantial increase in sales inquiries. Be sure to record the source of your new customer communications, so you can measure the success of your marketing efforts. Do not embed an email address into your website for communication. Install a form or have your web developer create a dynamic form that submits the potential clients name, email, how they found you and comment.
