Favorite

5 Tips for SEO Beginners

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Most people that are new to SEO find the subject to be daunting and some believe that they are not capable of managing their own SEO. Search engine optimization is not as difficult as it seems at first glance and basically consists of a number of small tasks that, if completed, improves the user and search engine experience of your website.

To make SEO easier to understand it helps to compare it with an advertising campaign. When you create an advertising campaign for your business you will start off by deciding on the market that you want to target and the product or service that you want to promote. The next step would be to determine a budget and to decide on the advertising method to be used (adds in the local paper, flyers to be distributed, magazine adverts, television advertising, and more.) Next proper sales copy will be written and images or photos added for visual effect. Lastly the impact of the advertising campaign will be monitored and measured in order to determine the success of the campaign.
We can look at SEO in the same way. The aim of the campaign would be to improve the visibility of your website on the organic search results and thereby increasing the number of visitors to your site. In order to achieve this you will need to run an effective advertising campaign for your website that is focused on the search engines as your target market. Using the advertising comparison we will take a look at 5 tips that could help you improve the SEO of your website.

1. Targeting a Market

When you run an advertising campaign that is focused on the search engines you need to target specific search queries or phrases that are relevant to your website. Proper keyword research needs to be conducted and a list of keywords that are relevant to your website, service or product compiled. These keywords should be used on your website, in the anchor text of links and in any advertisements to ensure that the search engines can understand what your website is about.

2. Promoting a Product

When you read an advertisement you expect the title to already give you a good idea of what is being advertised and the advert itself to provide you with all the relevant product information. In the same way search engines need to know what your website and web pages are about in order to list them on the search result pages. It is very important that you use relevant keywords in your website content, page titles, Meta tags and the anchor text of internal or external links. Page titles should clearly describe the content of a page and a description of the page should be included in the Meta description tag. Headings, bold text and underlined text should ideally contain some of your main keywords. Each web page should have a unique title and a description that clearly describes the page and sets it apart from the rest of the pages on your website.

3. Choosing an Advertising Method

With SEO you have a choice of advertising methods. Blogging is a very powerful tool and the search engines love Blogs that are updated regularly. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have become major players and should be included in your optimization strategy. Bookmarking your website on social sites, commenting on blog posts, submitting your website URL to link directories, submitting articles to article directories and creating forum profiles are just some of the available optimization options. Make sure to include a link back to your website when you use any of these options and don't forget to use your keywords in the anchor text of the links.

4. Writing Sales Copy

Unique and original content will go a long way towards improving the SEO of your website. Websites with poor on-page optimization but excellent content can still feature high on the search result pages. It is important to try and find something that you can offer or provide on your website that no one else can. Make sure to use your keywords effectively but be careful of stuffing your content with keywords. Always keep your users in mind when writing content and make sure that it is readable, informative and relevant.

5. Monitor and Measure

It is vital that you monitor the impact of your SEO strategy through the use of analytical software. Analytical software will provide you with an insight on how people reach your website, the number of visitors, conversion rates, popular content and your keyword rankings on the results pages. It will also help you to measure the impact that any changes that you make to your website has on the rankings of your keywords.
Creating a user friendly, informative and unique website should be your main goal. Making small tweaks to your website in order to improve the level of search engine optimization is not difficult and the combination of all the small changes will have a big impact on the visibility of your website on the search result pages. Good luck!

0 comments:

Post a Comment