First of all let’s keep in mind that there’s no perfect solution to your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign. There’s no need and no way to perfectly optimise your website, you should only aim to beat the person ahead of you. So if you are number 101 in the search engine rankings for your target keyword, you should strive to become 100.
If you are number 1 for a particular keyword, you need to concentrate on maintaining your position. Never ever think that your competitors will just sit there and let you get all the free search engine traffic, they will be constantly improving their SEO campaign and trying to knock you off the top spot.
… the question arises: Do you have a SEO strategy to start with?
“Long Tail Keywords”
Before taking the action of optimising a site, we need to understand what keywords we want the site to be optimised for. The strategy is simple: start with the “long tail keywords”. A long tail keyword normally contains 3 to 4 words, for example, if you have a website promoting motel accommodation then one of your long tail keywords might be “motel accommodation Christchurch city”. It should be something specific to the products or services your business provides.
Once you reach a top 10 position for the long tail keywords, then move your efforts onto the main keyword in your campaign, something that gets a lot more traffic, for example “motel accommodation”.
… another question asked: So how do you go about optimising your websites?
To carry out a search engine optimisation. We need to work on both “On Page Optimisation” and “Off Page Optimisation” – These might sound familiar to you, but are you doing it properly and effectively? Let’s briefly explain what the two terms means and what are the major factors that contribute to a successful SEO campaign.
On Page Optimisation
On page optimisation involves making small modifications to parts of your website. These changes might seem small when being seen individually, but together they can make a noticeable impact on your site ranking on search engines.
Number 1: Title Tag
The title on each page should be informative and descriptive in terms of the current page’s contents. Ideally, each page should have a unique title. This will help increase the chance for you website to appear against a wider range of keywords entered.
Number 2: Description Meta Tag
The description meta tag is a short paragraph that describes what the page is about. Description meta tags are important because search engines normally use them as snippets for your pages. Therefore, it’s vital to write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.
Number 3: Keyword Meta Tag
Although the keyword meta tag has declined largely in importance over the past few years, it’s still useful to enter a few center keywords that are relative to the page contents.
Number 4: Heading Tag
Headings of the page enclosed in <h1> – <h6> are used to present structure on pages to users. The <h1> tag is deemed as the most important element in the 3 major search engines.
Number 5: URL Structure
Using sensible URLs is important as search engines see them as more ‘friendly’ and ‘approachable’. In addition, URL to a document is displayed as part of a search result in search engines like Google and Yahoo.
Number 6: Content
Content is still King. Creating compelling and useful content are the most important approach to get a better ranking for your website. Use text that are easy to read and possibly with target keywords spiked. Make sure the information you have on the site is organised around the central topic and exclusive.
Off Page Optimisation
In contrast to on page optimisation, off page optimisation is conducted externally to maximise its performance in search engines for target keywords related to the page content. Any external entity linking to you, endorsing you or talking about you is grouped into off page optimisation. Although these are factors you don’t have control over, you can have a successful off page optimisation campaign by carefully planning and implementing.
Factors that should be taken into consideration are: Who have links on their website pointing to you? Who is mentioning you in their emails? and how you go about promoting your own site on other websites and media?
The buzzword of the Google Age is “backlinks” – they are the bread and butter of search engine optimisation. You can spend a lifetime optimising your on page factors but if you don’t have any backlinks then chances are you don’t get any rankings in search engines.
A backlink to your page is like a vote toward your page. It’s the way major search engines measure how important the rest of the world think your page is. Apparently if you have lots of votes then you are likely to appear in a higher position in the search results page.
However, not all backlinks are ‘weighted’ equally. If you get a backlink from a major website like trademe.co.nz then the search engines will place a higher value on it as opposed too a backlink from Edward’s personal blog or website. The difference is that the major sites have more AUTHORITY than a less known website.
Conclusion
Hope this post has been an useful piece of information for those who need a quick grounding of search engine optimisation. We will post more articles on the specifics of how implement the on and off page factors, so keep checking back.
Tags: fundamental seo, keyword selection, off-page optimisation, on-page optimisation, search engine ranking, SEO Strategy, top rankings, website keywords