Articles by SIMB
Search engine optimisation for everyone.
by Andrew Chapman
The goal of this article is to help our clients write their website content in a SEO-friendly way.
1. Choosing the right keyword combinations.
When potential customers are trying to find your business online, they will choose combinations of words that they associate with your services. For example, if I was wanting to purchase a Canon digital camera, I might search for “buy canon camera Melbourne”. Knowing what word combinations your customers are entering into search engines is of critical importance. If the content of your website doesn't contain at least some of the popular word combinations, your customers wont find you.
In addition to knowing what search phrases are being used, it’s also important to evaluate how flooded the market is for your product or service. If you offer a popular product, there will be a lot of competition from established businesses. As a starting strategy, it might be worth while choosing more focused search phrases. Consider the difference between the phrases “buy canon camera” and “buy canon camera melbourne”. The latter phrase is much more focused, which means there will be less competition and so achieving a good ranking is more realistic.
Finally, you should choose only one or two search phrases to focus on. Having too many search phrases in a document will dilute the important phrases, which will harm search results.
There are tools available to help you research the best possible keywords, including Google’s free keyword tool and Word Tracker (a pay service).
2. Using the word combinations to good affect.
Once you’ve chosen a couple of good search phrases, they need to appear in your document. There are a few factors here to consider:
a) The key words and phrases should appear in your web page title and heading. Headings on web pages are like the front page headings on newspapers; they are considered to be of vital importance.
b) The search phrases should also appear in the first paragraph of your text. As a rule, the higher up in the document the search phrases appear, the more important they are considered to be.
c) For a document to be considered valuable, it should be of respectable length. A document containing 40 words is not going to rate as highly as a document containing 800 words. Additionally, your search phrases should appear liberally in the document. Generally speaking, your search phrases should comprise at least 1.5% of the total word count, and can go as high as 15% before search engines will start thinking they are being “spammed”. There are tools available to help you with your keyword density.
Get relevant inbound links to your website.
Google pioneered the idea that if important websites in your market area are linking to you, then there’s a good chance that your website is also important. Your website will be scored according to how many relevant links are pointing to your website, and as a part of your on-going marketing campaign, you should get as many links as possible. These can be from:
- Other websites in your market area that aren’t competing directly with you, but are still related to you. As an example, consider a wedding dress provider linking to a wedding cake maker. They’re not competing, but there is synergy between these businesses. Often getting a link exchange in place is as simple as making a phone call or sending an email.
- Websites that are business directories. These websites place businesses into categories, and then provide descriptions and links to websites. Some popular directories include:
The first kind of links — ‘natural’ links from related businesses — are the best ones to aim for. They’re more favourably regarded by the search engines, and they’re also more likely to bring you business. Links from link farms are unlikely to do your business any good.
A good strategy is to find out who is linking to your competitors. There’s a good chance the same people will be interested in linking to you.