Organic SEO: Optimise your Website for free! (2nd Part)
Part 1 was about getting some insight and setting the scene with several key definitions about SEO (if you
missed it, click here). Now, I would like to focus on more details, especially how you can improve your ranking through using the right keywords and HTML coding on your website. Let’s start with the keywords.
Strategic website optimisation with keywords
When it comes to keywords, the first thing I would highly recommend you do is to make a long (I mean a very long) list of words and phrases which people could type into Google to find your company. Make sure that you add almost all words that refer in any way to your field, your products, your services, the problems you are solving and the solutions you are offering. Some questions you can ask yourself to identify your keywords:
What would our customer search for to find us?
What problems are we solving for our customers?
What solutions are we offering?
What is our product/service range?
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that can assist you to identify your keywords. (You have to sign up for a free Google AdWords account to use this tool: http://bit.ly/12QqmKq ). With this tool you can get information about the search volume of certain words or phrases and the competition on those words. Make sure that your keyword list includes words with high search volume and preferably low competition. Furthermore Google AdWords offers a “Keywords Ideas” functionality to help you out. Have a look at it and complete your list.
As soon as you have completed your keyword list, you’re confronted with the challenge of finding the “right” use of these words and phrases in your website’s content. You must use your keywords within the content of your site for organic SEO purposes however it is essential that your content still sounds natural, both for your users and for Google (yes, Google knows what you are doing here and if your content is only designed for optimisation it will be flagged).
Google doesn’t like keyword spamming. Try to spread your keywords across different texts on different pages of your website, don’t put all the keywords in one paragraph! That would be spamming. Another important indicator is your URL-address. Your URL needs to be simple, strong and easy to remember for the main pages. If it’s possible, create an URL which includes at least one of your keywords. You can’t exert more influence on the search results than with a suitable URL-address.
Strategic website optimisation with keywords using HTML coding
The World Wide Web is expressed in the hypertext mark-up language, HTML in short. The three main parts are:
DOCTYPE (declaration which version of HTML is used on this website)
HEAD (includes only information for Google’s WebCrawler)
BODY (content and layout structure of your website expressed in HTML)
If you are curious to see how it looks, choose any website, right-click and choose ‘view page source’. That’s it! It does look a bit scary and cryptic characters but hopefully your IT team can help you with the following to ensure your website is fully optimised. The most important HTML part to sum up information for Google is the second one, the HEAD. It also consists of three parts:
1.< title >
Every page needs a title.
The first (and the most influential) occasion to tell Google what’s on your page.
Google likes unique and natural sounded titles on every page on your website.
1.< meta name=“keywords” content=”[your keywords]” >
Put several keywords from your list in this field to help Google find your website.
Separate each keyword by comma and avoid phrases.
And always avoid keyword spamming.
1.< meta name=”description” content=”[your description]” >
Describe the content of your website in phrases
This description is part of the snippet which is shown on in the search results (other parts are the URL and of course the title of the page)
The final opportunity to use keywords is to put them in ALT tags. That’s the description of pictures which are used on your website. On the one hand ALT tags are an opportunity for visually impaired people to know what is shown on the pictures, on the other hand Google associates these pictures with your website and that’s what we’re looking for
Thank you for reading!
Moritz Maier-Borst
Moritz is a Junior Marketing Assistant at Sierra Marketing. Moritz has a passion for marketing to help start-up and small businesses grow beyond what they ever thought was possible. Moritz’ work at Sierra Marketing with clients including Study Network Australia, Careers Australia and Empower Institute. Moritz’ work mostly focuses on online marketing, social media and community management as well as market research.
