Posted under on October 25th, 2009 by Paul Barnes / No Comments

(Note: the below is relevant to most search engines but I will refer to Google for familiarity)

So you have a new website with great content and copy that has come straight from your existing company literature – everything looks and reads great but how is your site looking from Google’s point of view?

The chances are, if no due consideration has been paid to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Google will view your site with far less importance than you do and ignoring this may be cutting off your largest potential online marketing tool.

Be warned that high rankings under the most popular keywords don’t happen by chance in the vast and overwhelming majority. You have to work hard for it.

Google, like most other search engines, deploy robots or, in their case, Googlebots which visit your new site in stages and crawl the content at varying levels of detail with each increasing visit. After a period of time, Google has a detailed snapshot of all the content on your site but how does it know what to do with your site? It cannot view the pictures – it cannot interpret your industry jargon and it certainly isn’t persuaded by your slick marketing presentation. So what does it do?

To first understand the relationship between the user who is searching for content and your website, you need to understand accutely what your customers or audience are most likely to type in if they were looking for the product/service/message that you sell/promote. For example, if you are a garage that sells car tyres, one of your website keywords/phrases might be ‘car tyres’. Now, if you search ‘car tyres’ on google.co.uk, you will soon see that pretty much all other garage business that sell car tyres in the UK have had the same idea so, unless you are very confident, focusing on ‘car tyres’ as your sole website keyword/phase might be a mistake – you may be swallowed up in the deluge of competition and appear too low in the rankings to ever been seen at all. Remember that many web users rarely go past the first page of results.

Proper research should be first carried out using dedicated software by the website developers to determine the most appropriate keywords/phrases that people are already typing in.

This allows the developer to see the trends of keywords added over the previous few months, see the frequency these keywords have been added and also see the amount of results they already generate. This allows the developer to make a judgement about the likely ‘win’ factor of incorporating a popular keyword/phrase.

If a key phrase like, ‘car tyres’ is typed into Google 250,000 time per day but generates 1,000,000 website results, then it might not be the best to go for. A simple calculation which takes these factors into consideration, called the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) value, helps the developer cherry pick the most favorable keywords.

Simple Example:

Search Term: ‘car tyres’

Keyword popularity: 5 people

Results: 100 websites

KEI would be 5 / 100 = 0.05

Good KEIs are those with values closer to 1 (rarely gets close to the value 1)

Keywords & Keyphrases

The most accessible parts of a website that a search engine can evaluate is: written content, links, titles and tags. Most people are aware of ‘keywords’ but the actual art of integrating a keyword strategy within an online project is a whole layer of intense research, careful planning and long-term monitoring in it’s own right.

With keywords identified from initial research, these can be worked into many areas of the website to build a network on instances that a search engine can read and interpret.

Meta Keywords

Meta tag keywords are the obvious starting point but, only adding your keywords here will do next to nothing in terms of an overall Search Engine Ranking. This is more of a declaration to the search engine robots but it doesn’t score any points having this single instance of keywords. The next task is to start integrating these same keywords into all areas of your website pages.

Page Titles

Page Titles are the next step. Ensure your keywords are always mentioned within the browser page title and preferable near to the start of the page title. Titles shouldn’t be more than 65-75 characters long including spaces – this ensures that keyword density is maintained. Endless page titles with infinite keywords just floods a search engine robot and dilutes the impact of any main keywords.

We would suggest focusing on no more than 3 keywords/phrases and concentrate on mentioning these as much as possible throughout the site rather than spreading 10 or more keywords all over the place.

Title and Alt Tags

‘Title Tags’ – not the same as a browser page title – title tags can be added to image and link elements of html code. When a user’s cursor hovers over a picture or link when a title tag has been added, the tag shows to user so always keep this readable but, another set of instances on all pages to work in the keywords. ‘Alt Tags’ are often added in along side title tags and these are helpful for screen readers and accessibility reasons (in case an image cannot be displayed or seen). In many cases Alt Tags can replicate what the Title Tag reads.

Links

Links are another place to consider keywords. Firstly, a title tag can be worked into any link to give the user additional info about where a link is going plus with good planning, many of the website’s page file names can be labelled with keywords in so that navigational links within most/all pages are also mentioning the keywords.

Written Content

Content is king in a website and there is no better place to work a purple patch of keywords in than in the written text of a given page.
Ensure there are a good mention of keywords at the start of the text along with further additional mentions throughout.

Text near the top of a page also help as apposed to text which starts 1000px down the page after a raft of images for example. Bolding these keywords also draws emphasis and even linking them to other relavant pages which also mentions the same keywords can be a benefit, increasing the connectivity of a website.

Internal Links

Creating a network of internal links allows you to link keywords within written copy to other pages which also mention the same keywords – most well planned sites do this anyway but it doesn’t always happen naturally so it may need a dedicated global section on each page where each of the three keywords always appear as navigation links back to either the homepage or other relevant pages.

External Links

Probably one of the biggest and most influential factors on a search engine’s ranking and also one of the hardest to control. This relates to how many other sites are linking to your site. A search engine values this as it perceives a naturally popular site to be one of worthy information and also a trustworthy one.

When other sites of similar content/keywords link to your site, it is a big vote of confidence from the search engines. Imagine your site as one small isolated island in a group of other islands all connected with good transport links.

Suddenly, other islands start seeing the benefits of your island’s natural beauty and begin creating flights to your island to bring tourists in with the hope that some of your island residents will also fly out to them.

If a search engine can see that you are well connected to lots of ‘islands’ of extended information and resource, then quite simply you will rank as a more relevant search result than somebody who isn’t.

Addressing some of the above issues will always help but ideally, a healthy approach and investment of time in all will really start to get things moving. The task of SEO is a never ending one – the same as marketing a business in reality so don’t be fooled that one-off optimisation will solve all your problems.