by ScamperBranding - 09/12/2009

The Practical Guide to SEO

To complement our SEO Web Design services we wanted to create a really easy to use and practical guide to SEO that can be used by beginners and individuals wanting to optimise their own website for better search engine rankings.

This guide will take you through the main aspects of search engine optimisation step by step so that you can easily apply what you learn.

The guide is split into two main parts. In this part, we will be covering on-site SEO, involving all of the main things that you need to do to set up your own website, and it passed to we will be covering external SEO to outline the things that you can do away from your own website to improve the ranking of your site.

Part 1 – On-site SEO

1. SEO Strategy

• Before you start anything, identify the key terms for your website. These are the terms that when searched for, you would like your website to appear high up in the listings on Google, Yahoo etc

• Identify terms that people are actually searching for in your target country. User tools such as Google keywords tool to identify these terms.

• Think carefully about the relevance of particular search terms. Some terms such as “shoes” are very general, and while they may have a high volume of searches, there are likely to lead to sales. More specific terms such as “Salomon AX90 Pro Running Shoe” may have much lower such volumes, but suggested that the customer is specifically looking to buy a product, making it much more valuable if you are a retailer of that product. Strike a balance between terms of a specific and also have a reasonable number of people looking for them.

• Use exactly terms, not individual keywords e.g. “Running Shoe” is a single key term, not to separate keywords “running” and “shoe ”.

• Don’t spread your efforts too thin. Start off by focusing on one keyword to optimise your homepage and one additional keyword for each page of your website.

• Make sure that no two pages on your website targeting the same key term as this will create a conflict between the two pages

2. SEO URLs

• Choose a domain name that includes all part of your primary key to, and if possible emphasise that by putting as the first part of your URL and separating words with hyphens. For example, if I ran a SEO company called monkey, I could use the URL www.SEO-monkey.com, rather than www.monkey.com or www.monkeySEO.com.

• If you have a very large website, then you can use subdomains to include unique variations of your keywords in your web domain for specific areas of your website. The example, if I had a specific service aimed at SEO for charities. Then I could create a sub-domain with content about this service at www.charity.SEO-monkey.com, thus including the key term “charity SEO” in the URL.

• Set up your site to either use www or to not use www. This will help to avoid the search engines seeing http://www.SEO-monkey.com and http://SEO-monkey.com as two separate websites with duplicate content. Decide which one you want to use and redirect the other.

• Use your key terms as the page slugs throughout your website, separating words with hyphens. For example, if I have a page targeted at “Trail Running” then the page link should be www.example.com/trail-running

3. Meta Data

• Every page of your website meets correctly set up Meta data and tags

• Title – make your main key term for each page the first part of your page title. For example, if I have a company called Intertel and my page keyword is “IP phones”, then my page title should be something like “IP phones by Intertel” instead of “Intertel IP phones”

• Description – the description isn’t too important search rankings, but is displayed in the search listings and so has a huge effect on click through rates. Keep it short, relevant and include a call to action. Limit to 160 characters.

• Keywords – these don’t really count for much in terms of search engine rankings. But you might want to include mis-spellings of your main keywords to increase your chance of appearing when someone typed the keyword wrong in the search engine

• Ensure that all pages on your website marked with follow and index tags, and that any pages that you do not want to be indexed (e.g. your terms and conditions) are marked with no follow and no index tags.

4. SEO Content

• Your content tells both readers and searching is what each page of your website is all about. It is therefore the single most important aspect of your SEO.

• Each page should have at least one full paragraph of text (at least 200 words). Basically, is much relevant text as you can include without waffling or making your website look like a mess.

• Feature in your page specific key terms within the text frequently. Don’t overdo it though because it will look like spam to both visitors and search engines. No more than 5% of your contents should be a particular keyword

• Use headings. Divide the page up into sections, using your page specific keywords within the paragraph headings. Each page should have at least one H1 Heading and at least one H2 Heading

• Try to include other keywords from around your website in each page and hyperlink those keywords back to the relevant page on your website.

• Highlight your keywords within the text occasionally in bold or italics

• Include some images in each page relating to your subject matter. Use keywords in the file names and give the images titles and alt tags containing the relevant key terms

• Include an inventory of your products and services on a prominent page (probably your homepage) using exact keywords to represent your products

• Writes lots of pages. They don’t all have to be in your top navigation menu, but if your web site has lots of content folks round your main keywords and linking back to your main pages, then it will make the website as a whole seem more credible and more relevant, and increase the number of internal links. The blog is a great way of achieving this

• Regularly update your content and add new content, indicating such tensions that your website is well maintained and up-to-date.

5. Readability

• Use a web technology that is fast to load content and can be read by search engine spiders. Most are fine, but some such as Flash can be difficult or impossible to search engines to read.

• Use real text links wherever possible, especially in your main navigation menu. Try to avoid image links.

• Install an XML site map to help search engines index or areas of your website. Make sure that it is set up to automatically ping, Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask whenever the sitemap is updated. Also set it to instruct, search engines to crawl your website regularly. Exclude any relevant pages from the sitemap.

• Make sure that your pages are fast to load. If people have to wait too long, they’ll get bored and click away. Anything more than six seconds and you need to speed it up. Also, Google has recently announced that it is looking into using loading times in its search metrics.

6. Monitoring

• Install website analytics software such as Google Analytics or Mint

• For each keyword in your website, record your search engine position and the number of website visitors from that search term. Do this every month and compare with notes on what aspects of the website you have changed.

Check back soon for Part 2, or if you need help check out our SEO Services UK or SEO Web Design Service to get your website thriving in the search engines.