The SerpNT three step guide to SEO
1. Identify search terms - what are people searching for?
Identify the search terms (key words) for which you want your pages to be found in search engines.
No point having good search engine ranking on terms no one is looking for.
Tools for help with choosing keywords:
- Google keyword tool
- Overture keyword selection tool Displays how many times a certain keyword was searched for in a given month through Overture (Yahoo!).
- Overture bid amounts and keywords
- Wordtracker Keyword research tool
2. Optimize your pages - put the words on your site
Incorporate key words into the copy of your site's pages.
Keywords should appear in the URL, title, headings and introductory paragraph. They should also appear throughout the page content but do not overload it. (see keyword density)
URL. Pages should be located in a sensible directory structure that contains keywords. http://www.serpnt.com/key/word/structure. For example http://www.serpnt.com/fruits/citrus/oranges/. Whether your domain name should contain key words or not is a matter of debate. Having keywords as your domain name could improve your search engine rankings. Also sites linking to yours will often use your URL (or company name) as the link text. If that is composed of your keywords it will be very beneficial. This has to be weighed against the branding and marketing implications and domain name length and simplicity.
Title. Key words and company name should appear in the title tag. Search engines see words in the title as the most important on a page. There is a 66 character limit in Google. The title tag is what Google displays as the link tag text that you click on in the search results. All pages should have unique titles customised to the content of the page.
Headings. Key words should appear in heading tags (h1, h2, h3 etc). Search engines weight these more heavily than regular body text and in order (words in h1 are more important than words in h2 etc).
Meta tags. There are three meta tags you can add to a web page: title, keywords and description. Google is on record as saying it no longer uses the keywords meta tag but the other two are worth paying attention to.
- <meta name="title" lang="en" content="Keywords - companyname" />
Usually the same as the title tag. - <meta name="keywords" lang="en" content="Keywords" />
List of keywords separated by commas. Don't repeat words more than three or four times. - <meta name="description" lang="en" content="Short description (include keywords)">
Provide a useful description of the page but include keywords and company name. Sometimes used by search engines as the description in search results.
Keyword density. Key words should account for up to 10% - 15% of content, no more.
- Try: keyworddensity.com to see what key word density your pages have.
3. Link popularity - get linked to
Aside from the content of your pages Google rates your site based on how many links there are to it from other sites, these are backlinks.
Each backlink counts as a vote. The more votes, the better your site ranks. The higher the rank of the site linking to you the more effect it has. Bad sites linking to you might have a negative effect.
A very important factor is the text used in the links to your site from others. Ideally it should be composed of your key words.
Link out - include links on your pages to high ranking sites that have highly relevant content.