Search Engine Optimization for Newbies: Part 2

This is part 2 in a series of blog posts. The last post dealt with the question: How do I get on Google? This part deals with the question: How do I optimize my website?

The next question lies around optimizing your website for search engines which is sometimes called “on-site optimization”, in other words, optimizing the code or content on the site itself, as opposed to other tactics which I’ll get into later.

Content and keywords

When a user types in a keyword, they are looking for content. Google bots index the content on your website and makes a judgment call on how relevant your content is. Relevancy is the key thought to keep in mind because it’s what Google bases all of it’s decisions on.

So for example, if you are trying to rank well for the key-phrase “dry-cleaning in Halifax”, you would be sure to have a decent amount of content that describes your service and uses one or two combinations and variations on the words “Dry-cleaning” and “Halifax”. The content should be descriptive and helpful for a user who comes to the site, so avoid the temptation to overstuff your content with key phrases that is only going to turn away visitors and may get your black-listed from Google.

The choice of keywords is important, because many keywords are too competitive to even try to rank for. If you are expecting to be #1 for the term “computer” you might as well give up before you start. It is too broad and general, there is too much competition with deeper pockets. It also isn’t likely to get you customers either because a user may be looking to buy a computer, get a computer fixed, or looking for how to fix a computer. You would end up driving users to your site who immediately leave because it’s not what they are looking for.

But if you choose something like “computer repairs dartmouth” then you are likely to have fewer competitors vying for position, and as an added benefit, you will convert more users because the term matches what they are looking for. This method of choosing niche phrases based off of broad terms is called the long tail search.

Pages not websites

Next, keep in mind that Google ranks pages, not websites. This is why searching for a term like “Stephen Colbert” in Google will bring up the Wikipedia page for Stephen Colbert, and not the Wikipedia home page. So you don’t need to spread the same keywords across your whole website, just on the page you want visitors to arrive on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). As an example, the Headspace home page ranks well for “web design halifax” but our development page ranks well for “iphone app development halifax”. Using a sub page to rank for a particular keyword is called a search engine landing page and it’s the most effective way to drive traffic from different keywords to your site.

Other things to keep in mind

The scope of this article does not include listing all of the ways to optimize your website, but keep in mind that content is the #1 priority as I already mentioned. You also need to pay attention to properly formatted HTML (Title tags, clean semantic structure, avoiding placing content in image tags and Flash) This is where an internet marketing professional can help.

Ignore Meta tags

One of the most common misconceptions about SEO is that it is about meta tags. For those who don’t know, these are tags in the HTML that can contain keywords. When SEO was in it’s infancy, including keywords in meta tags helped make a difference in search rankings, but since it has been abused and people have “stuffed” these tags with inappropriate keywords, Google has placed little to no value on the content contained in these meta tags. Sure, it doesn’t hurt to include a few well chosen, appropriate keywords in there, but make it last on your list of priorities.

The same goes for alt tags (text in images) which are primarily useful for making your site accessible to blind users, however Google does read the content in these tags which can help images on your site show in Google’s image search results.

The last part of this series will deal with the question: How can I improve my ranking and get closer to #1?

Headspace Halifax Website Design