Simple SEO cheat sheet
Social media might be all the rave for its relationship building abilities, but people still use search engines to find things they need now and so SEO or search engine optimization is still a very important element of any marketing mix!
SEO
Here are a few basic seo tips for writing your pages and getting found in the search engines.
Before you start writing anything, do your keyword research:
1. Are people searching for your desired keyword?
2. Is there a lot of competition for your desired keyword?
3. Is your keyword “a buyer keyword” or a generic keyword? Eg. Buy a train ticket 18 dec from london to manchester on virgin trains
Vs.
Trains
(Although the first one is probably too specific but you get the point)
Those first steps are simple but possibly the most important steps to take, it can really be the success or failure of your campaign.
Make sure your keywords are groups of two, three four words or possibly more, this is what users search with.
Use your keyword phrase in the title, use headers and H1 tags, I personally prefer to use wordpress which does things automatically.
When google reads a page, it scans from top to bottom, paying more importance to the top of the page then the bottom so ensure that you have your chosen keyword or phrase within the first 25 words.
Try and keep the word count to about 300 words with a keyword density of around 7%.
Google is always evolving and as the internet evolves it will no doubt be very user voted, therefore make sure that it is readable and you have not sacrificed all the readability for these rules.
It will help your website if you crosslink to other articles or pages on your site so do so as much as possible, in the same respect make sure that the site is different to other pages on your site, using the heading, the keywords and the description.
Finally submit a couple of articles to an article directory to increase the number of links pointing back to your site.
Ultimately there are three parts to seo:
1. The copy (the words) what we describe above
2. The popularity (how many links point back to you)
3. Your back office – how your site is structured (does it allow search engines to read it or not)
Wordpress is great not only because its free but it automatically handles a lot of the back office stuff for you,
A great keyword research tool like keyword elite can really help by not only allowing you to see the popularity and competition of words but also which ones are buyer friendly and even how many links you will need pointing back to your site to get to number one.
That can be extremely useful when you are in the planning stages of preparing your site.
If you are looking for an in depth guide to learn SEO – you can check out Brad Callen’s SEO mindset which i am promoting, it basically has the in depth details that can help you take things to the next level
