Your crash course in SEO
For my first blog I want to answer the question "How do I make my keywords work effectively for my company's website?"
First of all, a quick overview of what SEO actually is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, but what does that precisely mean?
Overview of SEO
SEO is about obtaining the highest possible rank for any particular search engine Google, Bing, Ask, Yahoo! etc. Therefore without SEO you could have the prettiest site in the world that everyone would love, yet you would hardly be seeing any of that traffic towards your site as it has not been optimised. This means people who are searching for the keywords that you are targeting will be seeing your competitor's websites, effectively hiding your website.
How to use keywords effectively
Let me explain the correct way to select the keywords that you are going to target. Let's say my website is about my pet cat. I could use as one of my keywords "My pet cat, Poppy" and this could return as a number 1 listing on Google.
This is rather misleading as even though my website is showing up as a Google number 1 listing, not many people would be searching for "My pet cat, Poppy". This is a prime example of why being listed as number 1 for a search term means nothing if you are the only person that is ever going to be searching for your search term, more appropriate search terms to use are long tail keywords these are keywords that have less searches but are much more specific i.e.;
• keeping cats as pets
• Pedigree cats at home
Developing a keyword strategy is a balancing act between finding a search term that is used by enough people but also not being targeted by too many other websites. In general, if a search term appears in the title, description, content and address of your website then Google will assume that the page is relevant to the search term and therefore Google will rank it higher (than it normally would) for that search term.
Using this technique is basic Search Engine Optimisation. However, you cannot just simply input keyword after keyword on all of your pages, as once Google comes across your pages, it could blacklist your site. This is called keyword spamming, and should be avoided.
So how do I know how effective my keywords are?
There are lots of factors involved in determining whether you should try to optimise a web page for a given keyword. If you consider the 5 things below this will greatly improve your chances of getting that all important high search engine ranking that you are looking for.
- The number of Searches made (obtained from Google)
- The number of pages containing the keyword (Obtained from Google, by putting the search term in quotation marks in a Google search)
- The number of times the search term appears in web page titles (intitle) *
- The number of times the search term appears in web page anchor text (inanchor) *
- The number of times the search term appears in web page names (inurl) *
Ideally, you want a high number of searches, and a low number of competitors. The exact numbers that will be effective will probably vary according to the situation.
For a high volume marketing campaign, less than 10,000 searches a month may not be worthwhile. But for high margin specialist products, as few as 250 searches a month could be very effective. So knowing you product and clients, also has a lot to do with keywords.
Analysis of Keywords
It is possible to do the above keyword research manually, although saying that it is definitely not the most productive method. It would become very time consuming to do this for each of your keywords again and again, and record the results. The most effective way of using the above technique is for checking individual keywords that you may want to add to an existing site.
Maybe spark up a conversation with a web designer (or with Base Creative) about how to effectively (and productively) target your website's keywords.
*(See http://www.googletutor.com/google-manual/web-search/adding-advanced-operators/ for how to put these operations into practice)