Kev Richardson's BizToolz Blog

There are 4 basic steps to obtaining better rankings in the search engines and hence more traffic to your website. They include:-

Step 1 - Choosing the right keywords
Step 2 – Your domain name (URL) and page title (Title Tag)
Step 3 – Your headers (H1 Tags) and keyword density
Step 4 - Links

Step 1 - Choosing the Right Keywords

You might recall in the last post I mentioned that keywords are very important in SEO. Put simply, keywords are the words that a search engine user (e.g. one of your prospects/customers) might use to find information on a topic and the relevant web pages containing that information.

Strategically putting these keywords into the right areas of your web pages will assist greatly in optimising your website for the search engines. This is because your website must provide what people (and therefore search engines) are searching for, if you wish to attract traffic to your web site.

So choosing the right keywords to base your website optimization around is critical.

The first thing you need to note when starting out is that using general or generic keywords on your web pages is often not the best approach to use. When first starting out I suggest it is better to be more specific and focus on niche keywords relating to your product or service.

So try being very specific with your keywords, and remember that people often use more than one single keyword search phrase - the average search phrase often contains 3-5 related words.

For example, if you're optimizing a web development/building site like my www.biztoolz.com.au website, and say you happen to be located in Brisbane, Australia - then using keywords like:-

• "Web building Brisbane"; or
• "Web building services Australia"; or if you don’t want to limit yourself geographically
  perhaps something like
• “Development maintenance online web site”

are examples of search phrases greater than 1 keyword that potential customers might be searching on if they wanted a website to be built.

Just as an aside you might be wondering how I got “Development maintenance online web site” as a set of keywords. Well I went to the ‘Wordtracker’ keyword tool (I discuss this tool in more detail at the end of this section), entered “Web development” as a base keyword and then selected the phrase from the list provided by ‘Wordtracker’ (a big tip for you - I always like to pick potential keyword phrases that have 100 or greater searches a day being performed on them).

The second thing you need to note is if possible, when selecting keywords try not to compete with to many other websites that are using the same set of keywords. Makes sense doesn’t it! You want a niche that has as much traffic as possible (> 100 a day at least) and also low competition.

As another aside - to find out how many websites are competing with your keywords, simply do a search on Google using the keywords you have selected and note down how many results are returned. The more sites that are competing for your keywords, the harder it will be to get on the front page of Google.

So now that you can see why selecting the right keywords is so important, the next thing you will need are tools to help you research and find a good set/s of keywords.

Here are two good tools for finding good keywords (and they are free) …

Tools for doing keyword research

Wordtracker

A good web based on-line tool for researching keywords is Wordtracker. This tool has a free version that works fine and can be found using this URL - http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ .

Just enter this URL into your browser, type in the keyword/s you want to research in the blank area under the title ‘Keyword:’ and this will show the expected daily number of searches on that particular keyword if you get ranked one or two on Google. Importantly, the tool will also show the number of expected searches on what are termed ‘long tail phrases/keywords’.

As another aside - Long Tail keywords are often 2 – 4 keyword phrases which are very specific to whatever you are providing/selling. These are important because whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy. In virtually every case, these specific searches are far more likely to convert to sales than the general generic searches. By the way here is another tip, highly specific multi-word phrases tend to be far easier to rank well with than more generic single or double keyword phrases.

Goodkeywords

Another good tool (also free) is Goodkeywords and it can be found at this URL - http://www.goodkeywords.com/.

This differs from Wordtracker in that it needs to be downloaded to your PC first and then used. It is an excellent tool and can be downloaded from the URL above and at this URL - http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/gkw/ .

This tool operates in a similar way as Wordtracker in that after downloading the tool and clicking on the ‘Word Suggestions’ button – you can enter the keyword/s you want to research to find keywords that online users are likely to be using on-line and then click the ‘Go’ button.

Like Wordtracker, this tool will also suggests additional keyword phrase combinations you may not have thought of.

Step 2 – Your Domain Name (URL) and Page Title (Title Tag)

Two of the most determining factors in Google's ranking are your domain name and page title (i.e. the title that appears at the top of the browser after your web page has been opened/loaded).

Domain Name (URL)

For example, a domain name such as:
http://www.web-building-brisbane.com will generally get ranked higher than http://www.companyname.com, assuming the use of identical keywords and page content in both cases.

Just as an aside, it is often the case though that having a domain name similar to the example above is not easy for you to use because of several reasons. It might be that you might consider keywords in your domain name looks unprofessional, and/or you might already have a registered domain name you have been using for some time and so it might be just too late to change your domain name now.

If these apply to you then an alternative might be to instead add your keywords into the name of your web pages (as opposed to your domain name). For example, keeping with the same theme as above - perhaps calling your web page something like web-building-services.html.

Page Title (Tile Tag)

Your title tag is equally as important as your domain name. Using keywords in your title tag can improve your Google ranking significantly. However trying to achieve a balance of professionalism with keyword density in the title tag is sometimes quite challenging.

Going back to our example above of a web development/building company, a good title tag might be:



Usually, the closer to the front of your title tag the keywords are placed, the better.

Step 3 - Your Headers (H1 Tags) and Keyword Density

The Google ranking system often thinks that if you are using headers within the body of your web page content (for the more advanced i.e. using a h1 tag), then the text in the header must be more important than the content on the rest of the page. Here's a quick example:


Note: this is just the format to achieve a header like for example the header at the beginning of this section titled “Step 3 - Your Headers (H1 Tags) and Keyword Density”

Note: this is just the format for the normal text in the body of your content.

Keyword Density

Sprinkling keywords throughout your page content can also improve your sites keyword density. Keyword density simply means the ratio of optimized keywords to the rest of the content on your page. It is usually expressed as a percentage and should be between 3% and 7% for each page on your site (i.e. appear 3 to 7 times for every 100 words of content). Don't overdo the keyword density however as it will go against you (I prefer to keep it around the 3% mark).

Step 4. – Links

And this leads us to the most important (and time consuming) part of the SEO process - Back Links.

Most of what has been discussed so far helps to get your website ranked (sometimes reasonably highly depending on the market and your competitors), but usually if you want a high ranking then back linking will be essential.

Back links are websites that link directly to your website. The general principal is the more back links you have, the higher your pages will be ranked because the search engines think your website must be good if so many other sites are linking back to it.

Several ways you can start to build back links are:-

• Submit your site to dmoz.org, Yahoo! and other directories to increase the number of sites linking back to yours; and
• email a couple of websites each and every day to request back-links or partnership links (keeping in mind that the sites contacted should be relevant but not competitive) e.g. - If you sell an alternative health service (say massage), then partnering with a company that sells a different but compatible alternative health service (physiotherapy) may just be a good idea.

Within a couple of weeks of doing these things you should have a good number of sites linking back to yours!

Conclusion

With the tips provided so far you have enough knowledge to start optimizing your website. In my future posts I will reveal to you heaps more SEO tips and examples of how to apply them.

These tips will be worth real dollars to you so make sure you don’t miss them …

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

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

Labels: marketing on internet

# posted by Kev @ 7:11 AM