What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation.

“What does that mean” – you may also ask?

It’s basically a skill that attempts to direct targeted keywords linked to your website, to list on page 1 of google, yahoo, bing etc.

For SEO to be effective, work is done both on-page and off-page to get the best results.

For all the information that is floating around the web on this subject, I will share with you what methods do and don’t work, from my experience.

 

 

ON PAGE SEO

First, we should look at what keyword(s) you should be targeting.

Good keyword research is pretty much half your battles here. It’s easy enough to pick any keyword, optimise your webpage, build your backlinks then get your page indexed on page 1 of the search engines – but, if the keyword itself doesn’t have much traffic coming from it, you then need to change your keyword, to one that pulls in some good traffic levels.

Google actually provide a good keyword tool to determine if your keyword is a winner, or not. You can check it out HERE.

To use this tool – first, you enter what keyword you wish to start with in the upper middle box – you then select All Countries (or a local search option).

Personally, I normally select all countries for this option.

Enter what the CAPTCHA phrase is – HIT search.

Next – you will then see a list of keywords appear underneath that will show you not only your keyword, but other keywords that google see also relevant.

Traffic levels also show in the right hand column – but before you study these, you need to check a box over the leftside sidebar where you’ll see BROAD, PHRASE, EXACT.

Select EXACT and un-click BROAD.

Now look at your list – you will see keywords with [keyword] brackets.

The traffic levels will now have different values. A good start would be to shortlist the ones with a 5000+ value. These are search queries performed for the previous month.

Anything lower in value is not really worth your sweat to be honest!

With your shortlisted keywords, head over to Godaddy.com or namecheap.com to see if the domain name is available – ideally, you want ‘keyword’.com, .net, or .org.

If nothing is available, you could try ‘key-word’.com, .net, .org etc…..still effective but not as potent as having the total keyword without dashes.

How Google score you on your SEO efforts

 

Best results will come from placing your keyword in the following places:

1. Domain name (‘keyword’.com .net .org)
2. Age of Domain name – (the older the better)
3. Title tag  - located in the header section of your webpage HTML code
4. Meta Description tag – (first word)
5. Meta Tag – (first word)
6. <h1,h2,h3> tags
7. Main body content – in the heading, the first and last paragraph.

Meta tags – against popular belief – are not as potent as in the old days. You could almost count it as irrelevant these days – but it doesn’t hurt to include it – just don’t go keyword stuffing it – 2-3 keywords is enough.