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 PRO Traffic Generator Keyword ID Site Optimisation Link Building PPC 1000 clicks Read more ›› |
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For each of the major search engines, your ranking for a particular keyword will depend on two factors:
The relative importance of each of the above will depend on:
Getting your content right and building up links to your website will undoubtedly improve your search engine ranking. However, often people get hung up on rankings. Having good rankings are only important if they are for words or phrases that people actually search for in reasonable volumes. There is no point being ranked highly for phrases that nobody uses. Good search engine marketing focuses on delivering quality traffic – that is, people who are interested in buying your product. So how do we do this? Firstly, we need to know what search terms people use to find what you sell. This is called keyword research. There are a number of tools that you can use to help you with this. We use: Keyword research will usually identify a number of popular keywords and also a much larger list for phrases that are less popular. This is sometimes referred to as the comet tail effect as a few strong (popular) keywords form the comet and a much larger (less popular) list form the tail. How does this help? It enables you to choose the keywords and phrases you want to focus on for your SEO (or PPC) campaign. The starting point for identifying keywords for your SEO campaign is their relevance to your product or service. Avoid ambiguous terms if you can, for example ‘Golf’ could refer to the game or to the car! Also, if possible, choose words that either exist in your website text or could be substituted for similar words. The alternative is to re-write all your content! Many of the phrases thrown up by the keyword research will include poor spelling or grammar – unless you want people to think you cannot spell, these are best left to your PPC campaign. Once you have selected SEO key phrases, it is time to start optimising your pages. In very simple terms, this means ensuring that the phrase appears in (no particular order) the text content of your web pages, the titles, meta- description and (for what it’s worth) the meta-keywords. So you’ve selected your key phrases, optimised your pages and still you’re not ranking on the first two pages and the traffic’s not coming to your site. Why? Almost certainly because you don’t have many (or any) inbound links coming to the page. Sometimes, when you look at the first page of the search results you will find in first position of the natural search results a web page that does not contain any content relevant to the term you searched for. This is the power of links. Link power can be seen most clearly in Google. So what can you do? To gain high rankings for a popular term, you will need to have links coming to your site. But not just any links from any website. An ideal link comes from an authoritative website and contains text relevant to your search term. How do you get these links? Firstly, it helps if you have content that people want to link to. Typically this will be interesting, informative, newsworthy – content that cannot be found elsewhere. Secondly, people have to be aware of your website. They might find you through a search engine. But often at least to start with, you will need to tell people about your site and why they should link to it. This involves identifying potential sites that might be interested in linking to you. These might include portal sites, trade, academic, online media etc Each may have opportunities to link to you. Types of link may include supplier directory, news items etc Once identified, you then need to submit your request to each site involved individually. A very time consuming but very important process.
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