Kev Richardson's BizToolz Blog

In my last post I discussed the 4 basic steps of performing SEO. We have now covered all the basics you need to understand what Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is and the steps required.

The next step is to now show you in more detail the essentials of how to perform Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) when targeting a niche market.

Some of the tips I am about to show you by necessity can get a little technical at times. Don’t worry about this, as I will be taking things slowly by spreading the tips over several blog posts and support them with examples where possible. This way you can go at your own pace to understand and apply each tip.

Just a note of caution here – Where I provide examples incorporating html code (html is this is the predominant code used in building web pages) please substitute:-

• “<” for a ‘#’; and


• “>” for a ‘$’.

I need to do the html code examples this way because of the way blogs react if I did not do this. Basically the blog would actually apply the html code if I didn’t and therefore mess up the whole format of the post and make it almost impossible to read.

Finally, if you are not sure about anything discussed then I suggest you discuss it with your webmaster.

So let’s get started with your first 5 SEO tips:-

Use a descriptive title page META Tag.

Meta tags used within a webpage supply information to search engines about a webpage but do not affect its appearance. The most important Meta tags from an SEO point of view are the TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORD tags. In this section we will discuss the Title tag and the Description and Keyword tags will be discussed in the next section.

Write a descriptive title for each webpage of about 5 to 8 words avoiding the use of “filler” words such as “and”, and “the”.

Your page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Here is an example of what a Title tag does when I do a Google search on ‘Dog Training’:-

And this is how it will appear on your website – shown below.

The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (this is called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is nearly your entire identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.

Entice searchers to click on the title by stating your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or by using your business name and specialty. Using your business name and specialty is a good technique to use as it clearly identifies who you are. As an example, continuing with the dog training theme you might use something like:-

XYZ Dog Training School, Melbourne dog obedience training, specializing in dog obedience training and puppy pre school

To achieve this, using your HTML editor (e.g. Frontpage) place the title at the top of the webpage between the #HEAD$ #/HEAD$ tags, in this format: #TITLE$ Command Dog Training School - Melbourne dog obedience training #/TITLE$.

Something else you could do is ‘Keyword Stacking.’ Keyword Stacking is where you use a keyword phrase that contains a number of good, popular keyword phrases in it.

An example might be using the appropriate keywords that fit your business out of the following phrase – ‘Melbourne dog obedience training - Specializing in Dog Training, Melbourne dog obedience training, puppy pre school, problem behavior, boarding and training’

This will allow you to rank for phases such as - ‘Melbourne dog obedience training’, ‘Dog obedience training’, ‘Dog training’, ‘Puppy pre school’, ‘Problem behavior’, ‘Boarding’ and ‘training’, and so on.

Keyword Stacking is a handy trick that not many people have picked up on so you could use this to achieve a real competitive edge by ranking well for your selected keyword phrases.

The description tag is used by some search engines to display the text that appears below your hyperlinked title. So in the above example the words ‘Our school has a simple philosophy …’ is the description tag used there.

The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and key phrases that are actually targeted and used on the page. By the way, if you include keywords that aren't used on the webpage, this could affect your ranking.

Place the Description Meta Tag at the top of the webpage, between the #HEAD$ #/HEAD$” tags, in this format (note - some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title).

#META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT=" XYZ Melbourne Dog Training School provides dog obedience training and puppy pre school to the greater metropolitan Melbourne area"$.

Your maximum number of characters should be about 255 - just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

The easiest way to construct your Description and Keyword META tags is first write an webpage content or article, then write a description of the content in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and key phrases included in the article/webpage content. This goes into the description META tag.

The Meta Keywords Tag is where you list the keywords and keyword phrases that you've targeted for that page. For a keywords META tag, strip out all the common words, leaving just the meaty words and phrases.

The keywords meta tag is no longer used for ranking by Google, but it is currently used by Yahoo, so best to leave it in. Who knows when more search engines will consider it important again? Every webpage in your site should have a title, and META description tag.

Below is an example of using popular keywords while maintaining the local aspect so the business can be found through a local search (for those businesses where a local factor is important):

#META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="dog training, dog training schools, dog training melbourne, puppy training, kindergarten puppy training, behavior modification, dog obedience, agility training, dog obedience school, Command Dog Training, problem dogs"$

#META NAME="Description" CONTENT=" XYZ Melbourne Dog Training School, provides dog obedience training and puppy pre school to the greater metropolitan Melbourne area.$


Search engines consider words that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags.

This deals with text oriented headers the content sections of your webpage more than anything else. For instance, keeping with our dog training theme we are going to be using http://www.supercoat.com.au/dogs-obedience.aspx website to demonstrate this concept.



‘Steve Austin's Dog Training Tips’ is actually a #h1$ tag. Do you see how it is bigger than the rest of the text on the page? Where it makes sense from an appearance perspective to do so, I suggest where possible you use bold and a color also e.g. red.

There are a couple ways to do this, but in order to understand it fully we are going to use the easiest method.

This can be done in an HTML editor or a text editor such as notepad, and the code will look like this let’s assume a situation where bolding and the color red it also being used):

#h1$ #font color=”red”$ #strong$ Steve Austin's Dog Training Tips #/strong$ #/font$ #/h1$

This is the simple way to do it. As you can see, we are calling the h1 tag (all h1, h2, and h3 tags do is change the size of the text – h1 being the biggest), then declaring a color, and then making it bold. The text, Steve Austin's Dog Training Tips is in the center of that statement. We then close all of the tags!

Simple right? In order the do the #h2$ and #h3$ tags, you just substitute the tags into the above statement.

Don't expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines -- it won't. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine.

Keywords in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text.

Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document -- where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don't want to just artificially stuff keywords here, however - More is not better.

In truth, keywords are beneficial no matter where they are in your text, but right underneath your title is an extremely effective area to place them. You can use it as a place to write a summary of the article or have a definition of the topic involved. The search engines like it because whatever your title is, it should be similar to the content of the article or page itself. So it gives a search engine a more cohesive look at what your site is about. Remember, Google doesn’t interpret words! It just tries to find out what your site concerns from the text in it!

Overall, there should be no more than three to five keywords used a whole lot in any one page. For instance, if you are discussing the latest and greatest dog training equipment, you are going to want to keep the keywords to dog training equipment, agility dog training equipment, dog obedience training equipment, and so on. You don’t necessarily want to discuss dog training tips, breeds, shampoos, etc on the same page.

Also, site wide, you shouldn’t use any more than 35-40 major keywords with 3-4 that are your primary targets. For instance, each page is going to use the keyword ‘dog training,’ but might be split up between ‘dog training services, dog training bookings, dog training methods, and the dog training office’ itself. Notice, we have one main keyword, with a lot of underlying keywords to help reinforce the main one.

Some examples of good dog training oriented keywords are:

dog training
dog training collars
dog training collar
dog obedience training
dog agility training
dog training career
dog training schools
dog training tips
free dog training tips
career dog training
career in dog training
dog training equipment

Other places you need to consider using keywords in are the ALT tags.

These are where your images are located. We will use the previous website for example:

The code behind the image with “Steve Austin’s Dog Training Tips” would be:

#img src="steve_austin.jpg" alt="Steve Austin" width="560" height="102" align="right"$

Whenever you call an image on a website, it is going to have the #img src$ tag. But what is forgotten a lot of the time is the “alt” tag. What the alt tag does is let the browser know what the image is. In this case it is a picture of Steve Austin.

One nice little trick is to use the img and alt tags to put keywords in. This just increases your keyword density. For example, you might change the image name to be ‘Steve Austin’s Dog Training Tips’ or something similar. Then, you can put the same in the alt tag. Your new code would look like this:

#img src="steve_austin.jpg" alt="Steve Austin’s Dog Training Tips" width="560" height="102" align="right"$

This technique would make your site seem that much more about your business.


Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your page. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your important keywords and key phrases.

For example, if you were linking to an internal page of your site, it is better from an SEO perspective not to use the linking text, “Click here.”

#a href=”yoursite.com/services”$Click here.#/a$

Instead, you would want the linking text to be something more like, “Dog Training School Services.”

#a href=”yoursite.com/services”$ Dog Training School Services.#/a$

The more you give the search engine, the more they will like your site. If you just simply link text that says “Click here” you don’t tell them anything about where they are going. Instead, if your linking text says “Dog Training School Services” a search engine will know that the page they are going to deals with Dog Training School Services.

Until next time, as always I wish you every success with your business.

Kev
http://www.biztoolz.com.au/
info@biztoolz.com.au

Labels: marketing on internet