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Would you like your website to show up on page one of Google or Yahoo… and bring lots of online traffic to your door? Here are the basics on lifting search engine placement for small business owners…
It’s all about having the right keywords
You need to find out the language of your target audience. What key words and phrases are searchers using when they look for your kind of products or services? It may be quite different to your own language.
You can use the Google keyword research tool to generate a long list of terms that searchers have been actually using. After you enter some initial guesses, you’ll get a list of terms popping out – including some you may not have thought of.
For example, the list below came out of “dog food”…
You need to go through your list and select the most relevant phrases for your business – to attract the kind of prospects you actually want. The phrases most often searched for but not well covered by your competitors are the best.
Once you’ve got your keywords sorted, you need to use them to best advantage….
A sharp focus for each page
Optimisation for search engine placement (ranking) is done on individual pages, not on your website as a whole. Pages need to be focused on highly selective key phrases to get good placements. A wide scattering of words will only leave your page lost in the crowd. “Second hand golf books” is better than a general phrase like “books”.
Getting the right words in all the right places
A good dose of search phrases in strategic places on your web page is a big factor in search engine placement:
- Page title – the first thing searchers see in Google, also appearing at the very top of web browsers when they’re into your website
- ‘Description’ meta tag – a short summary of what your page is about, seen in Google straight after the page title above
- Headings – your major and minor headlines
- Body text – the main wording viewers see on your web page – especially the first few paragraphs
- Domain name – e.g. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com
- Page file names – what viewers see in their browser address window e.g. xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.com/xxxxxxxxxxx.html
- Image ‘Alt’ tags – the words embedded in the HTML page code describing images (normally invisible unless images fail to download).
The example below shows a page optimised for the phrase “web writing”:
SEO writing mastery
Writing content for high placement in search engines is all very well, but keeping it readable and ’sales-attractive’ at the same time is quite a skill. Some search engine optimisation specialists dump search terms adnauseum through the text, putting people off.
Smart SEO writing can create a variety of forms of each search phrase to avoid boring repetition. So, for “sailing trips in south pacific”, we could write:
Another way is to join key phrases together in different combinations.
The more content the merrier – but cut the waffle
More keyword-rich content on your site means a bigger target for search engines, but repetitive waffle won’t cut it. It needs to be concise, to the point, and relevant to hold viewers’ attention.
It’s a good idea to have plenty of pages covering a range of subjects on a search theme. For example a rental car company could have pages covering scenic attractions in New Zealand, driving safety tips, road maps, ferry info, etc.
Various key phrases could be used on these pages such as ‘driving tips for NZ’, ‘travel attractions in NZ’, ‘best scenic roads in NZ’ etc.
Search engine placement also depends on the history of visits to your site. Google notes if visitors find useful information and stay, or give up and exit. So, give them something to stay for!
Traps to drop your search engine placement
Firstly, be careful of over-saturating a page with key phrases, as this will be a pain for viewers to read and you’ll lose sales. It may even count against you with search engines because it’s not ‘natural’ language.
Secondly, watch ‘duplicate content’ – copying too much of the same text onto multiple pages – as Google will ignore all but the original page. Ensure you have at least 30% uniqueness. There are online calculators that can measure this for you.
There are other more ‘technical’ factors affecting your search engine placement that your web designer should know: avoiding websites built with frames or Flash; keeping Javascript and CSS code in appended files, and multiple domains forwarded with permanent versus temporary redirects.
Make it easy for viewers to find their way around
Search engines, like viewers, can get lost searching in a disorganised website and give up. It pays to keep the menu simple and consistent right through your site. It also helps to include a Site Map to list all the pages making up your website.
Off-site optimisation – getting quality in-bound links
Links from other websites will raise your site’s search engine placement and attract traffic – including blogs, forums, social media sites, business partner or cluster sites, search engine ads, and business directories. Some links you can create yourself, and some you have to ask for or pay for.
Each link is a kind of business referral and is most beneficial when it:
- is related to the subject of your website content,
- comes from a web page having high search engine ranking itself,
- has link text that includes relevant keywords.
Here’s a sample snippet from a web page:
The yellow highlight shows link text pointing to another page focused on “content writing”.
Links to your site are more beneficial for search engine placement when they’re one-way rather than reciprocal (swapping links). They are also less valuable from pages having heaps of other links on them. Email, e-newsletter, and e-zine links also have value to bring traffic in.
Submission to search engines
Search engines read off each other, so the more of them your site is submitted to, the better. But only the major ones are worth the effort. They each have a page to submit your website URL with maybe a short description of your site, eg the Google submit page.
Where to from here
That’s it in a nutshell. Of course you can just about get a degree on the subject these days! Applying all the above is actually not that easy, so you’ll probably need help to get good results. There are plenty of search engine optimisation specialists around – some who know what they’re doing and some who don’t.
The real aim is to get the best sales results from your website. To this end, make sure you have a good writer on the job. Check their track record of search engine placements and sales results. See the author notes below if you’d like help.
You might also be interested in …
- Attract more business from your website with text that hits home
This post was written by:
David Frank – who has written 2 posts on Business Blogs.
David Frank’s company, Spectra-Media, focuses on “organising and presenting information for effective communication” for website content, printed marketing material, and technical documentation, with a specialty in engineering, technology, and professional services sectors. 04-562 7408
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