Search Engine Optimisation – How to Optimise Your Site

SEO is a difficult process. There are many tricks, many intricacies and many pitfalls.  
Leaving aside the lesser points, here are some SEO instructions that will cover the main points to optimise your web page.

1) Optimise one page at a time. Google looks at each page individually as well as your Website as a whole. If you have a Website about farm animals, don't try to optimise every page for horses, cows and sheep, have one page for each.

2) Select well-performing keyphrases. Ensure the keyphrases you select are keyphrases someone might actually search for. You can do this using the Google Keyword Tool. Read more about selecting appropriate keyphrases.

3) Page URL is important. Name your pages with keywords ie. www.farmexample.com/cows.html. This is Google's first indication that your page is relevant to a search for “cows”. To name your pages like this, the file you create for your page must be titled cows.html (or .asp or .whatever). Remember that if you are renaming a page you must 301 redirect to the new page. For example if your cows page is currently named page1.html then you should 301 redirect page1.html to cows.html otherwise Google will see it as duplicate content

4) Page Title Tag is the next most important item. The aim of your title is to provide an accurate title with as many keywords as possible. The Title goes in the head section of your page. For example: 
Cows | Example farm animals Australia | Cows, Bulls and Calves
The length of your Title Tag is up to you and there is no definite word limit, but Yahoo has one of the longest Title displays at 120 characters so certainly keep it below that. Google displays up to 66 characters, so perhaps that's a good length to aim for. My opinion is that Titles rarely need to be lengthy, so unless you can see good reason to do otherwise, aim for approximately 60 characters or less.

5) Page Description Tag is also up there. Make sure you don't just list a whole heap of keywords in here, make it a description worth reading because Google may actually display this in the results. You should use your description to sell your site whilst also including keywords. For example:  
Cows information in Example Farm Animals Australia – Information, photos and videos of Cows
Again there is no real word limit. My opinion is that the description should be longer than your title but not novel length. I personally aim for 100 characters or less.

6) Page Content. This is the body text of the page – the text people read once they land on your site. The SEO cliché is that “Content is King” and as sick of reading it as I am, true it is.
This is the part where I feel it would be unjust of me not to point out that the most optimised page in the world will convert no customers if the page content is meaningless. DO NOT fill your page content with keywords. Keywords will flow readily if the content is relevant to the keywords. It is of no use writing simply “Cows eat grass. Cows give milk. Cows have four stomachs.” This will only disappoint the page viewer and they will click back faster than your page can load.  
My technique is to write the page copy thinking nothing of keywords. I then read back over it and if there are places where I can substitute keywords without disturbing the flow of the page then I do so. NEVER sacrifice content for keywords.

So there you go, there are the basics. If it already looks too hard or time consuming or if you are competing for more sought-after keyphrases simply contact me for an SEO quote.

I'm actually pretty open to being contacted about this stuff so if you have questions ask them in a comment on this blog and I'll be happy to answer.

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Search Engine Optimisation / Search Engine Marketing – Which one is for me?

Increasing Website traffic is a great way to boost business for most companies even if their core business is not online-based. Getting more people looking at your Website means more exposure for your business, higher company profile and more chance for word of mouth.  
There are a few ways to get traffic and two of the most popular are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  

Search engines are the best place to start steering customers because now this is the first place people go to find a product or service. Gone are the days where we turn to the yellowpages; now we head straight for Google.

So which is the solution for you? Let's look at the differences.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Organic search results are the unpaid results that appear in your search. These are the Webpages the search engine thinks are the most relevant to your search.  
Searchers tend to pay a lot of attention to the first three organic results, some attention to the rest of the first page, occasionally they will navigate as far as the third page and they will almost never look any further.  
SEO is the art/science of enhancing the visible and invisible parts of a Website to gain increased volume and quality of traffic to the site. The aim is to make the page highly relevant to certain Keywords and phrases and for Google to consider the site highly relevant for searchers of those terms and, therefore, display the site in the organic search results. 
If your site appears on the first page for a certain Keyphrase you are guaranteed to get a share of that Keyphrase's traffic. The higher in the results you appear, the better.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
The paid advertisements on the search results page of Google are at the top of the page and down the right hand side. In other search engines they can be in different positions including at the bottom of the page and scattered throughout the search results.
The benefit of paid appearances is that they appear on the front page for your chosen Keyphrases regardless of how poorly optimised your site is. You can spend as much as you like to ensure you appear on the front page for as many Keyphrases as you wish (some limitations apply).
The disadvantage is that users do have a tendency to skim over ads and concentrate more on the organic results.  

In Summary
SEO is a long-lasting effect, putting your site in a credible, highly visible position for people searching for your type of site. It will pay dividends long after you have forgotten what it cost.
SEM is just as targeted and more guaranteed but only lasts while you're spending the money. The cost over time will be far greater than SEO.  

My Advice
Use both. Target your keyphrases hard by also paying for listing even if the organic and paid results appear on the same page. Pay more for keyphrases for which you can't achieve front page ranking.

Search engines are where Internet traffic starts. Make the most of it.

Visit Melbourne Online for more.