Search Engine Optimisation – 3 Simple Secrets
Posted on June 4, 2010
What are 3 Simple Secrets of Search Engine Optimisation? Simple because its just so easy. Secret since its so dead easy, that website owners don’t spend the time doing it, nor doing it as they ought.
SearchMasters rank top for the highly fought for phrase Search Engine Optimisation on the country specific Google.co.nz. They train web site developers and clients, as well as SEO’ing and Google online marketing many sites. Many sites that SearchMasters are asked to help, have not implimented these 3 simple secrets.
- Selecting Search Phrases
- Adding the selected phrases to the html head
- Adding phrases to the pages content
Whilst there are a number of other things that are needed for correct Search Engine Optimisation, the 3 simple secrets should be the first steps to search engine optimising any page on a website. A majority of people focus 1stly on inbound links, and yet the words on their pages are not properly targeted. With inbound links strategy, you need to target the key words selected, and have them as link text. But without 1st choosing the proper search phrases, link building is not worth much.
1. Search Phrase Selection
What words are people Googling for – use the Google Keyword Selection tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- pick the country that you are targeting
- pick “exact” match – not broad match since you are after traffic for the exact phrase
- sort by the “Local Search Volume” column
Think about regionalization – your country, city, region, suburb name in the key word phrase
Think about categorisation – what categories do your services or products fit into.
Competition Analysis
Search on your specific country’s Google domain (ie Google.com, or Google.ca, etc) and use the SEO for Firefox tool.
I set the SEO for Firefox tool to show Google PR with an automatic 1 second update, and Yahoo site links as the same.
I think about my clients site and its present Google PR and amount of in-coming links, and assess against the competition’s PR and incoming links. Am I able to get the client into the top 10? Or is there an alternative phrase that maybe has less traffic, but is more achievable.
What search phrases per page
Pick the most highly competitive, but also achievable search phrases for the homepage – the general category that you are selling your services or goods into.
Pick 1 other page of your web site as a 2nd page for each of the targeted home page key words. This gives you the possibility of an indented result for the Google search – two results out of ten for a normalusual google search. Having a webpage that is able to be an indented result will often lift the ranking of your main page even if the 2nd page is not actually showing.
If you are an shopping cart website, think about all the other distinct categories that your products could fit into. Create 1 page for each search phrase or groups of keywords.
2. Adding the search phrases to the html head of the document
- page title
- meta description
Title
Google shows seventy characters for the title of each page in its normal results. If you have over seventy characters, it cuts off at the closest word, and adds 4 characters ” …” one space and three dots. If adding those characters takes it over the seventy characters, then it cuts off another word from the end of the title.
Therefore if you keep to the maximum seventy characters in the title, you keep the highest level of control over what Google shows, and you have the maximum number of your characters showing.
The meta title is the most important part of SEO in as much as everything is important. There can only be one “first word” in a title. Google for something, and generally you will see the search phrase move to the left, the lower on the search results you look.
So often website owners add the business name to the front of their title. The search phrase should come first, then the brand name/website name at the end IF/IF and only if there is room for it.
For ecommerce web sites, you can have a programmed formula for the meta title – the category or product of the page.
Meta description
Google shows 155 characters of the meta description if you search for single/double/triple word phrases. For longer search phrases, Google will show longer snippets. For instance for a five word search phrase it can show up to around 240 characters.
I prefer to keep my meta descriptions to the max 155 characters. Otherwise, Google cuts off the snippet and adds the ” …” space dot dot dot at the end, thereby cutting off some words. If a long search phrase is searched for, then I let Google pick the snippet from the 155 character meta description, plus words on the page.
The meta description is not used for ranking a website (it has zero weighting in the algorithm). But a good meta description will get you clicks.
Use the main search phrases from your meta title and add a unique selling point for your website.
A good meta description means a clickable snippet on Google, and more clicks even for lower rankings.
3. Adding to the content of the page
H1
My formula is to have an H1 then an opening paragraph. The H1 signifies that the content is starting, and helps distinguish between the header, menus, footer etc of the html page. I have a dumbed down version of the main keyword phrases – just one of the search phrases of the page title. Simple and readable. Like “SearchMasters – SEO Consulting / SEO Training”
Opening paragraph
So often I find that people are targeting a keyword phrase, yet that phrase is not included in the content of the page. The EXACT phrase needs to be on the page. Since the website homepage is so powerful, you can have phrases that are related to the title, in the content of the page and get good rankings for them. For instance “Search Engine Optimization” might be in the title of your page, but you would also be able to get ranked for the British spelling “Search Engine Optimisation”, or “Search Engine Optimization Consultant”, or a regional “City Search Engine Optimisation” …
Since you can’t get all your phrases into the opening paragraph, you might need extra paragraphs to keep it readable. You do not want to keyword stuff.
You need to at least have say 250 characters of text including the main search phrases with no links in that text. The opening paragraph content of a page should be “The Answer”, not directing to another page that has “The Answer”. Further down the document you certainly can have links to other resources.
If you have too small an amount of unique text as compared to header/footer/menu text, then your page is less likely to get cached and ranked on Google. Ecommerce sites
Don’t use your header/footer/menu text as text that you are trying to get a page ranked for. That text is not unique to any one page on your website, and is therefore not proper user information in the eyes of Google.
Unique text
You need unique words around the first instance of your keyword phrase in text on the page. If you are using a manufacturers description for a category or product, add some auto generated text as your opening paragraph
like “Purchase productname on bestshopping, the place for all your cheap productname.”
What does “Unique” mean? Google for multiple words putting quote marks around the search phrase and the word before and after that phrase. That specific phrase ought to be unique for your website. But often you will find that other websites have copied it. So change your opening paragraph formula, or change the words before and after your search phrase, and make the content unique again. When others copy your content Google will often not rank you as high. Sites that are not very powerful will suffer in the rankings more than powerful sites that get copied.
I am often having to rewrite meta descriptions and content for my clients New Zealand based Car Rental Auckland very competitive website. When you rank high on Google for competitive phrases like in the car rental industry, so many more people copy your content, and search engine rankings can often go down when too many people copy content.
So there you have it -Search Engine Optimization’s Three Simple Secrets. Follow the simple secrets, and you will have a good foundation for adding incoming links into your website and ranking top ten on Google and the other search engines.
Michael Brandon is a leading NZ SEO consultant training website developers, and web site owners, and Search Engine Optimizing websites worldwide.
» Filed Under Uncategorized
Comments
Leave a Reply