Search Engine Optimisation

Transcription

1 Search Engine Optimisation 1. What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation which is the process of making your website search engine friendly (click) so you can move to the top of Google s Results. SERP s are the individual results Search Engine Results Pages. SERPs The goal for your company is to get to the top of the SERP s. The top spot is a good guarantee of free, organic traffic for your site how often do you click on to page 2 or 3? However, it is difficult to gain top spot. It takes time, work and discipline to build natural traffic through SEO. A way to rank quickly is to purchase advertising space through Google Adwords even though many customers have become Ad Blind. Google Adwords info@prosperily.com 1

2 This module is a very quick overview of SEO to get you started with finding a keyword that you want to optimise one of your pages for. 2. How does it work? There are many search engines but the main one everyone optimises for is Google. Google uses robots like this friendly guy, also known as spiders or bots, to scan through websites looking for the words that its users are searching for. We call these words keywords. The bots search or crawl through website by links. These bots feed information back to Google s algorithm or SEO calculator. If Google s algorithm calculates that your website is easy to use, relevant and compliant then it will serve your website in its search engine. The more relevant and useful it perceives it to be the higher it will rank it. SEO is essentially the art of making your information more attractive to Google so you can reach that top spot. If you are interested in SEO as a method of targeting customers, you will need to research it carefully as blackhat or spammy links and content will get you penalised and blacklisted by Google. A good rule of thumb is always keep in mind that Google wants to serve the best information to its customer (the searcher). info@prosperily.com 2

3 3. Keyword Research So how do you choose what keywords to use? Seed Keywords Firstly start with the words that most closely describe your service: eg: learn photography One free tool you can use for keyword research is SeoBook.com. After registration, click on SEO Tool from the navigation bar, then Keyword Tool and input your initial search term. Learn Photography is our seed keyword and from here I can see suggestions of other relevant keywords as well as their monthly searches. That is not the full story you also want to know how difficult the keyword is to rank for. To do this copy and paste the keyword into Google s Search Engine. Near the top of the page it shows how many pages are ranked by Google for this keyword meaning that your keyword has been found on their website. This is an indicator of how competitive the keyword is. Next I create an excel spreadsheet to compare the numbers. For this search, our seed keyword was Learn photography. Even though this info@prosperily.com 3

4 has a large number of searches it also has a huge amount of competition. So I went for a longer keyword often known as a key phrase and eventually got to one that looks pretty good learning dslr photography. The monthly searches are a lot lower but the competition is also much lower. I prefer it to the one above it because that is too niche specific to property. Also, there are less people searching for that term and more competition. Based on this information learning dslr photography is the keyword I would focus on. Also a quick look at the top ten results for your chosen keyword will tell you a lot about your competition. If all of the links are from well-established authority sites like Amazon, Forbes, Wikipedia etc then you will be better off trying to rank for a more niche keyword with less competition. For example for the search term learn photography, the first results are ads, then a Featured Snippit from the page that Google considers most useful followed by lifehacker.com and then canon. We are very unlikely to be able to outrank those websites easily. info@prosperily.com 4

5 Choose a more niche keyword / keyphrase even though it has less searches, optimise it well and in time you will find your site starting to rank for more competitive terms naturally. This is a very simple overview of conducting keyword research. There are many other factors involves such as the number of quality backlinks a site gets, the domain age, site speed, on page optimization. There are endless resources online devoted to this topic. If you really want to do more in-depth keyword research then the tool I use primarily is kwfinder.com. This is a paid tool but it gives you much more information about keywords for comparison. As with most things online, you have to take all tools with a pinch of salt and a little intuition goes a long way. SEO is a constantly evolving process, with Google updating its algorithm to filter information more efficiently and tools coming and going quickly. Until two months ago Google s Keyword Tool was the main tool for keyword research but a change to tool to make the search results more generic made the tool almost useless for researchers unless they already had paid advertising. To keep up with SEO requires constant research and attention but the basics can be achieved by following the steps in this module. We will discuss how to implement SEO within your website when we are building pages but having the research done in advance allows you to plan your pages for search engine optimisation. And who doesn t want free traffic good things come to those who wait and work hard at it. info@prosperily.com 5

6 4. Take Action 1. What are your initial seed keywords? 2. Use SEO Book & Google Search Results to fill out the excel spreadsheet attached to compare your keywords. 3. Have a look at the first page results for your keyword and see if it might be possible to rank for them with a little work. If all the first page results are dominated by authority sites it might be worth focusing on less competitive keywords. 4. Choose 1 3 keywords to focus on initially. If you focus on any more than that you will find it difficult to optimize. In time you will be able to create more pages and posts on your website and optimize for more niche keywords. As your website starts to become more popular and Google starts to rank the pages, you will find that you will start to rank for more competitive keywords naturally. 5. Rank your keywords in order of priority for your own clarity and add these keywords to your Marketing Plan under a new section called Search Engine Optimisation. It is very useful to have all of your website information in one place. info@prosperily.com 6