So, now that your have your all singing, all dancing website, you need to think about how you are going to let the world know it is there. There are various ways to market a website. E-newsletters, providing offers and news can be a good source of traffic and promote your newly uploaded website. Similarly, a Google Adwords campaign can be a great source of traffic.
But, there are also some very simple changes you can make to your website to see a change in traffic generated by search engines. Below are a few of the basics, primarily targeted towards Google, and its guidelines.
Basic SEO
First – tell the search engines what you do in a clear and concise way. Think about descriptive keywords which tell a story about what you do and add them to your written content.
Don’t forget – your website is a sales tool. Yes, it can brand and market what you do, but the focus must be on generating leads from what you are presenting to the user.
Eye-candy is all well and good – but it is the content which is important.
Keywords Inside Page Content
In order for search engines to understand who you are and what you do, they send ‘robots’ to crawl your site and scan your content in order to build an picture of what the page is all about. Think about what people will be typing into search engines and searching for, with regard to your product. For example, if your have a bookshop based in Chiang Mai, there could be various alternatives which may lead a user to your site, such as ‘books chiang mai’ or bookshop chiang mai’. Google has a great keyword research tool which can help you decide which keywords or key phrases will generate more traffic: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Page Titles
Next, make sure each page has a title relevant to the content of that page. Keep the title around 60 characters as Google will only show a certain amount of characters in their results. Include keywords or key phrases from the page but make sure the title makes sense, and is not just a list of words. Remember – keep it specific to the page content!
Meta Description
Again, as with the page titles, keep the page description relevant to the page your are working on. Think of the description as a mini advert for that page. Try not to list keywords but take snippets of the page content to build a brief overview of the page. To keep it Google friendly, keep the description to 156 characters.
Meta Keywords
Although some say that these are relatively redundant, especially with Google, I would still suggest adding between 5 and 8 keywords relevant to the page content.
Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps are a way for you to give Google information about your site. It is placed in the “public_html/” folder of your site.
In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.
The Sitemap will let Google know how often pages are updated, the date each page was modified, and helps Google find pages that may not be linked. Here is a link which explains more and will generate an XML Sitemap for you: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
You can also present a html based sitemap at the front end of your site, visible to the user, which is just a simple page listing all other pages and links to those pages.
Indexing your site
So, once you have the ‘basics’ in place you will need to index your site. Google have a very helpful section named ‘Google Webmaster Tools’ where you can index your site and follow it’s progress by means of helpful feedback and statistics. Click here: http://tinyurl.com/5uhnzq
I hope this gives you a head start with regard to basic SEO and optimizing your site to make it a little more search engine friendly.
Many thanks to a friend of mine, Craig Killick from the Escape in the UK, for his book about the same subject – Let’s Cut To The Chase. This online E-book was a major source of inspiration for me with regard to small business website optimisation.
Thanks to Aaron Wall and the team at SEO Book for their latest download – the SEO Toolbar.
