In fact, studies from comScore reveals that 85% of all internet purchases start with a search and 50% of internet purchases are immediately preceded by a search on a search engine. When searching for services or goods on the internet people often don’t go further than the second or third page – most don’t go beyond the first one. So, it makes sense to ensure your website ranks high, it’s often the difference between commercial success and commercial failure for a lot of small to medium-sized businesses (SME).
Here are our top tips to help you plan your SEO strategy:
Set reasonable targets
The first thing is to set targets. To do that, you need to have an understanding of what internet users are searching for in your field of activity, and how strong the competition is on these searches. Some tools can help you: Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights, Yahoo! Site Explorer (these are not exclusives, just examples). Depending on how many results and how strong the competition is, you’ll know how difficult it will be to rank above them, and therefore how much time and effort you should put in.
- Beware that SEO is not an easy thing, and often many companies are competing for few places at the top. Hence why it’s important to target not only the most searched keywords but also long tail keywords, for there is less competition.
- Also remember that achieving good rankings cannot be done overnight, it will often take a few weeks to see an impact, and a few months to achieve your targets.
Focus on the most important ranking factors
Once you’ve set up your targets, you need to start your SEO activity. This splits in two: on-site (optimisation of your website’s content and structure) and off-site (link building). Given the high volume of work required by SEO, it’s sometimes difficult to do it all. You then need to know what the most important ranking factors are, and focus on these ones for a maximum impact. Here is a list of what is commonly accepted by the SEO community as the most important ranking factors:
- Optimising your title tags: One often-overlooked, but simple technique is the optimisation of your title tag. This displays the text that appears in the bar at the top of your browser. Search engines generally place more value on the title tag than on keywords in the actual site, so a few things to consider in order to make title tags more effective are:
- Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. Ask yourself who your ideal visitor is and which search terms they are likely use to search your website.
- Make your title text relevant to each specific page of your site, for example, if you sell digital cameras and your business is called ‘Gadgets for You’, it’s worth titling the page that lists digital cameras ‘Digital Cameras from Gadgets for You’.
- Avoid using unusual characters unless they are absolutely necessary.
- Don’t use too many words in the title. Google, for example, displays a maximum of around 60 characters including spaces; MSN shows about 70.
- Don’t include vague terms, for examples, a car dealership is unlikely to get a top ten search results spot for the term ‘car’ because there is so much competition, however, something specific like a car model is likely to give better results.
- Don’t overuse keywords in your title tags, for example, putting ‘car Ferrari car’ in a title tag may penalise your site in the search results.
- Use of headings and sub headings: in HTML tags such as H1, H2, etc. are designed to indicate a headline hierarchy in a document. So a H1 tag might be considered the headline of the whole page, while H2 tags would serve as sub-headers and so on. Best practice is to use the title tag of a page, containing the important keywords, as the H1 tag. Not only does this provide keyword relevance to get easily found by search engines it also delivers a great user experience as the prominent headline identifies to the searcher that they have arrived at the right page.
- Internal linking and navigation: in order to ensure the search engine crawlers can find the pages of your website and index them accordingly it is important to ensure you website navigation is usable and that where useful you link from one page to another. Navigations built in flash or using images are less accessible for the search engines so you should aim to use a menu system which uses a text link based system for maximum accessibility.
- File names and URL structure: Many people starting out in SEO pay little attention to the URLs where their website pages sit but the search engines use the URL content as an indicator of page relevancy. A page on a plumber’s website about boiler repair for example should be placed at www.website.com/boiler-repair rather than www.website.com/services. This is just another opportunity to indicate to the search engines the topic of a page’s content.
- Content: too often websites don’t have enough content on their website, or don’t make the most of their existing content. Make sure your content includes the keywords you’re targeting, but don’t get keyword crazy – make sure your content makes sense both for the search engines and for the users reading it
- Relevant links: a large part of the current algorithm of search engines is based on links. You can see links to a website as a testimonial of its “popularity” and relevance to web users, and so does search engines. Generating relevant links is one of the most impactful SEO activities and thus shouldn’t be overlooked.
Making changes such as these should help you build a platform for your websites SEO to grow from.
Measure the success
Don’t forget your main objective is to generate more revenues for your business. Therefore you need to measure the impact of your SEO activity as your search ranking evolves – and to make the most of your SEO, there is nothing better than a website that delivers.
So rankings are not the only thing to monitor, but how do you measure the impact of your SEO – and more generally of your online marketing and website success? You do it through web analytics. For SEO the main things to watch are the quantity and quality of visits generated through organic search, and if you have a transactional website the sales generated.
Don’t focus solely on SEO, and get some help if necessary
SEO is a great way to generate traffic and revenues, but is not the only one in the online marketing toolbox. Pay Per Click (PPC), display, affiliate marketing, social media are worth the consideration, and web analytics are a must do for anyone serious about building an online business. So make sure you don’t become a “ranking junkie”.
Finally, if you don’t have time to do it all yourself, you might consider outsourcing your SEO activity. Whether you just need to be led or you need a full service, the experience and knowledge of a SEO consultant or an agency having worked on many websites will definitely help your success, and will save you a lot of time. However, selecting a consultant or an agency is not an easy thing to do. Beware of false claims such as guaranteed positions on Google, or promises of surprisingly fast results. Make sure the agency / consultants you hire have a proven track record, adhere to your objectives and are totally transparent in regards to what they are going to do to improve your rankings.
BT has over 15 years experience in providing internet services to businesses – contact us on 0800 917 0692 for a free web review.
