Search engine Optimisation

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Marketing and optimizing a website for search engines is a broad topic. There are many aspects to contemplate when heading out with the goal of improving your website’s visibility,traffic and ranking within all the search engines. In part one I will discuss the highly vital topic of website keywords. In future articles I will discuss additional topics such as page rank, ppc advertising campaigns, marketing techniques to avoid, and current analysis technologies including eye tracking software.

Choosing the right keywords for a website is an vital and informative research task. In the process of improving your website you’ll learn a lot about your industry and your competitors.

Keywords are one the primary factors that come into play in the algorithms exploited by major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live Search. If a net surfer is looking at for household decorating tips and types ‘home decorating’ into a search engine, it will search its database for websites that incorporate that set phrase and those single words.

Selecting the right keywords

If you are an expert in your field, you know what your customers are looking for. Specifically, you know many of the words and phrases your customers would use to describe your products and services. Start with what you know.

Write out a list of phrases and words that describe your business. If you have a home decorating business you may reckon of words like ‘interior design’ and ‘furnishings’. Sort your list so that the most common phrases are on the top of your list.

You should then cross-reference your list of key words that you compiled with other lists generated for your bussiness. This will bring to mind other keywords that you may not have thought of. I recommend using a well loved web-based keyword research tool named Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com). Word tracker helps source more key words and key phrases and offers a free trial of their product. The trail version will only give you only a limited number of related words, but is still an brilliant starting point. Probing for related keywords for ‘home decorating’ with Wordtracker produces a listing of keywords similar ‘home’, ‘decor’, ‘decorating’, ‘home decor’, ‘furniture’, ‘design’, ‘interior’, ‘interior decorating’, ‘art’, ‘wall’, and ‘fabric’.

Other keyword tools, which produce similar results, are also available. These will include, amongst others, the web based tools provided by Yahoo (Overture) , and Google.

After compiling and merging the various lists of keywords, you’ll be ready to go on to the next step.

Using the right keywords on your web site

Now that you have a clear picture of which keywords web surfers may type into their search engine to find your business, you need to be sure your website contains these vital keywords.

A strategy is required when updating your website to include the keywords in your list. Starting at the top of your list, quickly review the keywords. Determine which of these key words would normally be present on your web site and which of these key words you probably wouldn’t use. Using the first list of keywords, you may now start reviewing the different sections of your website.

Your most vital key words must be placed in throughout your site with the proper frequency. The web site content should focus on making sense to your visitors, not filledwith keywords that could improve your search engine positioning. Search engine algorithms can detect the over use of keywords, which can negatively affect your positioning. Let’s go ahead and look at different areas of your web site.

Web site Title

Every website has a title. This is not a website logo or a bold heading found on the top section of a website. This refers to the web site title showed in the web browser’s title bar. This is the top most area of the window located to the far left of the window’s minimize, maximize, and close buttons. The web site title is also the information showed in search results, which is in a larger font and underlined. The website title is the first thing that a web surfer sees when performing a search. Web surfers quickly scan through search result website titles to evaluate which website will meet their needs. This is your first opportunity to grab their attention.

A web site title must contain as many of your key words as possible, while maintaining simple readability. This will do two things for you. First, the search engine will find your website in its database and show your website in their results. Secondly, the web site title will attract the surfer’s interest as they see that their search criteria matching your web site title. Over-stuffing the website title with key words makes the title hard to read and may be seen as abuse by search engines spiders. The website title is updated by changing the text located between the opening and closing title tags, in the header of the HTML code (Page Title). The title length should be restricted to very small words. The website description allows more space for describing your products and services.

Website Description

As with the web site title, the web site description should likewise comprise a mixture of keywords. Unlike the web site title, the web site description is non visible on any section of the web site itself. The description is the sum-up information you see in search engines results, showed beneath the web site title. The web site description gives you a slight more space to describe your web site and your products and services. Once again, be certain that your description is easily readable for your visitors, in order to draw in them to click your web site title. The website description can be updated by changing the text in the description meta tag, in the header of the HTML code ().

Web site Keywords

Along with the title and description entries in the HTML code, there is as well an area to define a set of keywords that you’d like to link to the page. This is called the keyword meta tag. Keywords are entered as a comma separated list, as follows (). The industry consensus is that the keyword meta tag is currently of small or no use with today’s major search engines. But, search engines continue to recommend their usage.

Web site Content

This brings us to the meat of our website, so to speak. Our elect keywords should be used throughout the web site content where it makes common sense. Once more, over-stuffing page content with keywords so that the subject matter is unnatural can be detected by search engines. A beneficial exercise is to use the keywords to make the page subject matter more descriptive. For instance, a pet store may trade a assortment of pet foods. This can be written in a descriptive style, such as, ‘dog solid food and cat food’, rather of using ‘dog and cat food’. In this illustration the keyword ‘food’ is used twice.

Headings and Hyperlinks

Exceptional care should be given to the employment of heading (This is a Heading) tags and anchor tags (click here). Keyword employment in page heading is more than valuable than keywords used in a paragraph of textual matter. The same can be said about anchor tags (a.k.a. hyperlinks) – Text Links. Using keywords as the clickable textual matter of a hyperlink is really valuable.

Keyword Denseness

Keyword denseness refers to the part of occurrences of your keywords compared to the other textual matter on the web page. Keyword concentration tools such as Webconfs.com’s Keyword Density Checker (http://webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php) provides a visualization of the main theme or message on a chosen page. This tool counts the number of times each word is repeated on the page, which is a excellent test of how you’ve done at inserting keywords to optimize the content. It is also a dependable representation of how search engines will see your web page. ‘More is better’ is not the most effective keyword density goal. Although the optimum keyword density is much debated, having some balance is certainly in order. A density below 1% makes it hard for a search engine to know your main message, where a density over 5% will start to make the content appear unnatural. At this phase in web site optimisation, the page content can be continually edited while the keyword denseness is being re-checked. Continue this process until your keywords are among the words with the highest density.

Closing

Choosing the right keywords for your web site is a must. Web site keyword optimisation is not rocket science, but it must be enforced cautiously. By using the right keywords, not only will your site be positioned well in search results, but it will draw in visitors to your web site.

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