How to use Search Engine Optimisation

Pretty simple really: you need to identify the words people will use to search for what you’re doing or selling, and get them into the underlying code and the text on the page. So many people forget to put keywords in the text.

But the other thing people forget is not to talk constantly about themselves.

Think of it like this: in a crowded room full of people, would you rather hang out with someone who is attuned to your needs (who talks about you), or someone who’s talking endlessly about themselves?

It’s a no-brainer really: it’s all about us!

The world has changed from the old-style of presentation. We no longer trust big institutions and aren’t as likely to be told what we want, and who we are. That’s the attitude, however, that’s presented when you put copywriting on your site that talks about what you do. For example:

Tall Poppy Digital is a long-standing web design and copywriting business, in business for 2 years with many clients. We provide web design and copywriting services and itemised quotes to make selecting our services easier.

That was all “me, me, me” copywriting. The equivalent of the person in the room talking endlessly about themselves.

Tall Poppy Digital, in business for two years, is here to help you find the best solution to your web design and copywriting needs. And with itemised quotes so you can see exactly what you’re getting and choose the things you want for your budget, it’s difficult to find a better deal.

The second one is talking to YOU the reader. It’s saying we’re going to listen to you.

Ultimately, the best copywriting is not-only going to transform a website visitor into a client, but will keep people on your site for as long as possible – one of the many measures that Google uses to determine your placement in its results.

For those not in the know, you set the signature in the Settings > General tab.

But if you’re using Mozilla’s Firefox internet browser, it’s not such an issue — once you install the Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures add-on.

Do this in Firefox from Tools > Add-Ons then click Get Add-Ons and search for Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures.

Once installed, and you fire-up Gmail, whenever you open a message, or write a new one, you get an additional two buttons at the top:

Create Signature — gives you a panel in which you can create your own signature for the email address you’re sending from

Options — gives you signature position (above quoted text or below) along with a bunch of links for further information. You can even donate to the people who created the plugin if you like it enough!

Once set, you can have a unique signature for whatever email address you’re sending from. Which is a vast improvement for the system.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology/biztech/its-another-mummade-virtual-world/2009/04/27/1240684398714.html

Ideas can be made real if you do your research; never more so than in the online world.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology/biztech/beginners-guide-to-google-adwords/2009/04/27/1240684398708.html

Interesting stuff – Google Adwords has to be one of the most useful ways of targetting advertising for your business — it’s based on the search that a person enters into Google and advertising (very short and succinct) is displayed down the right hand side of the screen.

Basically what you have to do is work-out the keywords (that is, the things a person will enter into google to find something specific) and the advertising is displayed based upon that.

The nice thing is that you don’t pay for the ad to be displayed (or served as the terminology goes), you pay if the person clicks on the ad (the advertising is also called Pay-Per-Click advertising). But if you’re even more clever, you can do two things:

• You can put a phone number in the Adword — which lends to the potential customer just calling you instead of clicking (which means the adword is effectively free advertising)
• You can use the same keywords in the content of your site – which means that it’s more likely to be displayed in the search results which the majority of people (the figure is something like 70%) will click first over the advertising at the side and top of the page. Free advertising again.

http://smallbusiness.theage.com.au/starting/management/happiness-is-…-your-own-business-614575596.html

But actually, it’s easier than you might think.

So, SEO; what’s it all about?

For those not necessarily in the know, SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation) is all about getting your site to appear high in Search Engine Results.

SEO is about the words that someone enters into Google in order to search for a particular thing, be it a hairdryer, a movie venue or even software company.

What a business has to do is to work-out what a potential customer (for the purposes of this discussion, a customer is someone who wants to look for a particular site to view information or buy something) is likely to enter into Google to get a particular result.

So, step one is to identify your customer; know thy audience.

Step two is to identify what good or service you’re offering, and you need to be as specific as possible.

A practical example

Customer A is in Fitzroy and is looking for a screwdriver. A Philips head screwdriver for preference.

In this instance, they might first enter:

“Screwdriver Fitzroy”

Which could give them any number of results, in this case, quite a few about assaults in Fitzroy using a screwdriver!

Now the search is narrowed-down and more information needs to be entered to be searched on.

“Philips head screwdriver fitzroy”

This one gets us closer, but not close enough. We’ve got descriptions of screwdrivers at wikipedia and a number of other resources.

Another go after a little thought: where would you buy a screwdriver?

“hardware store fitzroy”

This one hits gold. There are 10 businesses listed as hardware stores on the Google map that appears, and a bunch of other relevant listings.

What have we learned?

Well, first, that experimentation is the key to working out what variation on keywords will net the best result.

But what we need to begin with is a better understanding of what is actually being searched for, and potential sources of the particular item or service. In this case, “screwdriver fitzroy” wasn’t clear enough and we needed a completely different variation on the theme: “hardware store fitzroy” gave us the answer we really needed.

Do remember that even if you have a website, you’re not at this point trying to get your site to appear in the results. You’re looking in a general sense for competitors and other sites which are related to yours.

But how is this knowledge applied?

So, you’re wearing the solid black boots of your customer (or the rather nice red heels depending on who the customer actually is), and you’ve worked out some words and phrases (known henceforth as “keywords”) which will get you the results you desire: a group of sites which are related to whatever you’re providing or selling.

Now you need to put the keywords into your web pages.

Now, web pages are written in code, which will send many people screaming to the hills with screams of “I’m a business owner not a computer programmer!”

But as I said at the beginning, it’s not as hard as you might think.

Now to make a simple (and perhaps unexpected) comparison: a web page (at least, the code that makes it up) is rather like a letter that you send through the post.

Both have a top part, a middle part and an end.

A letter has the name of the person you’re sending it to, a date, who it’s from and a “Dear”.  That’s the top part which for the sake of this discussion I’m going to call the “head” (as it’s at the top).

Then you’ve got the content of the letter – the message to the person in question. I’m going to call this the body (as it’s below the head).

Last, you’ve got the “yours sincerely” and your name; basically the polite conclusion of your letter. Let’s call this the foot!

In a web page, we have a similar structure: There’s a Head (marked by <head>) in which specific items are placed, such as the keywords, description of the page and title of the page, and there’s a Body (marked by <Body>) where the actual content that appears in the page goes. Then there’s the end, which is where everything — like the letter — is concluded and closed-off.

By the way, anything surrounded by “<“ and “>” is known as a tag. This is in the same way that a sentence has a Capital Letter at the beginning and a full-stop at the end.

For SEO, the important tags are:

• title – <title>page title and keywords here</title>
• description – <meta name=”description” content=”Your description here”/>
• keywords – <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” name=”keywords” content=” keyword, keyword, keyword”/>
• body – <body> page content goes here </body>

The title tag

Found in the <head>, the title tag is used for the page title (at the top of the window) and in Google results. For the purposes of Google, it is best to put your highest hitting keywords (that is, the keywords that have the best results) into this tag. You have 70 characters to work with for the purposes of Google.

For example:

<title>Hardware Melbourne, Hardware Store Fitzroy, Screwdrivers</title>

The description tag

The description tag is also in the <head> and used by Google and displayed — along with the title — in results. This is the text that appears that explains (hopefully) what the page is all about. If this is missing, Google will place the first paragraph (up to 155 characters) into the results instead. Once again, it’s good to put the highest hitting keywords in here.

The keywords tag

The keywords tag contains the keywords that you’ve researched. Opinions vary as to how many you can place here, separated by commas, but it’s generally about 40 of them. Again, you’ll find this in the <head>

Google will reward you for making the keywords relevant to the content on the page. So if you’re selling a hairdryer, you might put “hair gel” in amongst your keywords. You wouldn’t put “Angelina Jolie” unless she’s endorsed the product and you’ve named her on the page. More on this later.

The Body tag

The body tag contains everything that will appear on the web page. There is likely to be some code, some text and references to graphics in here.

What we’re particularly interested is anything in a paragraph tag:

<p> your content here </p>

Here is where the final part of SEO comes into force.

To truly optimise your website and the pages, you need content. Content — as has been said by many online — is King.

The key here is to follow the following formula:

• make the text readable; it’s got to make sense to your customer otherwise you’ll lose them
• include as many keywords as possible (as mentioned above, “hair gel” versus “Angelina Jolie”
• include clear features and benefits (a feature is what it does, a benefit is how it helps your customer)

How it all works together…

Google sends out little computer programmes called “bots” which trawl the net for content. They look at the title, description, keyword and body tags, and everything in-between.

In order to paint a coherent picture of your site, the bots do a spot of comparison (as well as a bunch of other things that Google are tight-lipped about). Where a website has content that matches the keywords and a title and description that contains these keywords, they put it all together and your site appears in Google results accordingly. Sites where title, description, keyword and body share as many keywords as possible will fare better than those that don’t.

Once you’ve got your place in the search resultsl, the ongoing work begins: You have to work out which keywords are working and which are dead-weight.

For that you need to add something to the <head> of your webpage: Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

Google is really great with free content (as should we all, but that’s another story for another time), and provide several different services to help you improve your site rankings.

One of these is Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Analytics provides some code which you can easily cut and paste into each web page on your site.

Then what it does is it monitors all visits to the site and builds up a coherent picture of:

• The keywords that led people to your site
• The number of unique visitors to the site
• The pages they visited
• How long they stayed on the page

and much more.

This information is listed and graphed for you to see – and it’s absolutely free!

For improving site SEO keywords and content, this is absolute gold, and a great place for anyone dabbling in the art to begin.

But wait, there’s more!

Google lists sites according to SEO as well as popularity. So it’s not just the SEO work I’ve mentioned above that will help. For example, you can exchange links with your suppliers and customers (this is known as a Link Exchange).

You can also list your business on other sites: I recommend:

• Google Local Business Center: http://www.google.com/local/add/splashPage?hl=en-US&gl=US
• TrueLocal: http://www.truelocal.com.au/
• HotFrog: http://www.hotfrog.com.au/

Google Local Business Center creates a map for your business which can appear in Google Results and which you can add to your website.

Google uses TrueLocal in Australia for business listings.

All three sites, however, act as both referral sites and potential sources of customers.

Finally, Google also keeps a track of whether sites have been updated regularly. If your site is kept maintained frequently, you’re saying to Google that you’re still operating and still in business. If you update your site once a year, your site will drop in results as Google will think it’s not being maintained and therefore a dead site.

Parting thoughts

The web is a great new source of income for any business, and like your physical business, you have to keep it up to date. If you’re an electrical supplier, you need to replenish and update your stock, and the same is true of your website.

SEO isn’t a set-and-forget proposition; you have to keep it up to date if you want to keep and improve your place in results.

Good luck if you choose to take this mission..!