Having identified the keywords you’re going to target, you now need to ensure Google sees your website as a good match for those keywords when people are searching them. To do this you need to put your keywords in the right places on your website – this is know as on page optimization.
We recommend each page of your website should only be optimised for a maximum of 1-2 keywords. And for each page, include your keyword in the following places:
- The title tag
- The meta description
- The meta keywords
- Within an <H1> tag
- Early and often in the text on your webpage
- Within an internal link
*Please note: If you don’t know html, you may not be familiar with these terms, but that’s OK. Just pass this information onto your web designer or SEO company.
If you’d like to find out more about website optimisation, watch the video below:
First things first, you’ve got to plan your SEO campaign. It all starts with getting to know the landscape of your market. What searches are your clients typing into Google? Who are you competing against and what are they doing? The aim here is to build a list of potential keywords to further analyse and at this point, the more the merrier.
Start with a common word or phrase that is appropriate to your business. Your starting point doesn’t need to be clever or creative, just relevant to your business niche. For example, a good starting point, if you were a dentist, might be ‘dentist’. Search this keyword using one of the following keyword research tools:
- Free Google Keyword Tool
- Wordtracker
- Market Samurai
These tools are designed to help you expand your keyword list by offering a number of derivatives or suggestions related to that keyword. They will also tell you how often those
keywords have been searched and how competitive they are. Document all those keywords you think are appropriate and run any additional searches on any newly discovered phrases.
Now with a big list of keywords, you need to identify the top ten to twenty keywords to start targeting for your SEO campaign. You should identify those keywords that represent the best opportunities for your niche. You want keywords that are ‘buying phrases’ with a good balance between low competition whilst also being highly searched.
*Buying phrases (as opposed to browsing phrases) are more specific searches that indicate the customer is ready to purchase. For example, a user searching ‘Sony Handycam HDR-SR11’, as opposed to just ‘Sony’, is much further down the buying funnel. They know what they want and their choice of keyword search will reflect this. You want buyers… not browsers.
Watch the video below to find out more about planning an SEO campaign:
Are you targeting the right keyword phrases for your target markets?
A successful online campaign starts with SEO keyword research. An extensive keyword discovery process will determine the direction of your campaign in relation to the key phrases you are choosing to target.
Many businesses and site owners know immediately which keywords they want to target. But the most obvious keywords are not always targeting the qualified traffic that every website needs. Yes, it just may very well be the perfect phrase, but if it isn’t, you could wind up spending a lot of time and money pursuing a ranking that either will never happen, or will provide very little value to your site.
There are a few key areas to look at when conducting SEO keyword research and choosing a target phrase:
1) Relevance – Is this phrase even relevant to your site and its content?
2) Search Frequency – Are people even searching for this phrase?
3) Competition – How competitive is this field? Is it even a feasible target?
Doing some keyword discovery to find the best keywords is the groundwork for your SEO campaign. Without it you’ll be flying blind with no clear direction on goals. We provide extensive SEO keyword research to discover what search phrases to target to grow your business.
Site and Competitor Analysis
How Attractive is Your Site to the Search Engines?
We review the content of your site to ensure that it is presented in a way that both the Search Engines, and your site visitors, will find easy to understand. We examine the internal and external linking to your site and see how you stack up against your competitors. Did you know to surpass your competitors in the search engines you must match their SEO efforts and more?
To learn more about SEO keyword research, watch this video:
The way the search engines work is rather like a popularity contest. How do you determine what makes a popular website? The more popular the website the higher it is going to rank in the search engines. We need to think of ways to make the website as popular as possible. When Google came out, one of the things that made it hugely popular was they re-engineered the way their algorithm, adopting a different approach that had never been done before. The theory they came up with had a lot to do with the way citing works in academic theses. A research report became more important if it was referenced in other research reports.
This is in the real world. Let’s say someone writes a research report on cancer. There may be another report written on cancer. In that report they say ‘In such and such a paper they said this’. The more references the first cancer report gets, the more weight it has, because everyone is referencing it. Google used the same technology and theory with search engines and re-engineered the way search engines work. Now let’s move away from academia and talk in terms of a popularity contest.
2. Be Cool – A Popularity Contest
To do well in a search engine, it is like a popularity contest. Say we have Pedro here. If we wanted to make Pedro a really popular, cool person, what determines if he is really popular and cool? It’s not what you say, you could say ‘I’m the coolest person in the world.’ Unless anyone agrees with you, it doesn’t mean anything. To increase your popularity, you have other people saying, ‘Pedro’s cool, Pedro’s cool’.
Now it’s starting to look as if Pedro’s cool because everyone else is saying he is. Not only that, certain people’s opinions are worth more than other people. Let’s say Cameron Diaz already has lots of people saying ‘Cameron Diaz is cool, Cameron Diaz is cool’. What happens, when she, who is already considered cool, says ‘Pedro is cool’. Because she already has many people who say she is cool, her opinion has more weight than all the other people. You really want to try and have people who are important and in a certain position to say ‘Pedro is cool’ because that has more weight.
Let’s transfer this thinking to the search engines. In order for a website to become popular, you need to get lots of other websites saying ‘This website’s cool, this website’s cool’. The way people say a website is cool is by linking to it. So that gets back to the idea of Google being quoted. These two analogies are the best ways to consider how search engines work. Search Engine Optimization described in its simplest terms is a method to increase how many websites say you are COOL.
The way the search engines work is rather like a popularity contest. How do you determine what makes a popular website? The more popular the website the higher it is going to rank in the search engines. We need to think of ways to make the website as popular as possible. When Google came out, one of the things that made it hugely popular was they re-engineered the way their algorithm, adopting a different approach that had never been done before. The theory they came up with had a lot to do with the way citing works in academic theses. A research report became more important if it was referenced in other research reports.
To do well in a search engine, it is like a popularity contest. Say we have Pedro here. If we wanted to make Pedro a really popular, cool person, what determines if he is really popular and cool? It’s not what you say, you could say ‘I’m the coolest person in the world.’ Unless anyone agrees with you, it doesn’t mean anything. To increase your popularity, you have other people saying, ‘Pedro’s cool, Pedro’s cool’.
