A Guide To Sensible Search Engine Optimisation Techniques
Wow! What a wonderfully complicated process search engine optimisation is and understanding it can be extremely daunting, that is until you break it down into smaller bite size pieces.
For example many people get hung up on making sure their website is keyword rich and of course highly relevant to their chosen industry. This is called on page SEO.
Even though this part of the SEO process is only responsible for about 10% of the over success to your website being promoted successfully it can alone give you the edge over competitors so should not be taken lightly or indeed forgotten entirely.
Make considerable time to methodically add keywords into your pages visible content and also those not so visible areas like the meta and alt tags. Search engines use information stored in the tags, site map and website description to quickly identify what it is your site is about so take time to do this properly. Don’t repeat keyword after keyword though as this is basically Spamming.
Definitely avoid at all costs repeating words or using what webmasters call black hat techniques like stuffing keywords into irrelevant areas so as to not add value to the reader.
There are also a few grey hat to avoid like using white writing on a website with a white back ground. Again this really is quite a pointless exercise but still recommended by some so called experts.
Grey hat techniques are not quite forbidden but they are time consuming and very low impact on your SEO ranking so I really would not bother if I was you. Just construct your website using your own value adding content and you will get better results.
One great SEO tactic and often overlooked by website owners that are promoting a product is a blog. Now this doesn’t mean to have to update it daily although that would help but weekly or even monthly posts would be considered good on page practice.
So what about off page SEO? For starters time is on your side and it has to be as many off page SEO techniques can take days, weeks or even months to work, so being patient is paramount for sure.
Links – They are the holy grail of SEO. Driving traffic to your site by having your websites URL on other websites and promoting your websites pages from other sites. Sometimes called link juice this method is by far the most important out of all of the SEO practices.
That said make sure you don’t backlink from sites that are deemed inappropriate. Aim for websites, blogs and directories that are relevant to your own website. Try to get links promoting your site added to these sites and make sure that you use your main keywords to describing your business or website.
The golden rule when link building is not to opt for the bulk back linking systems and farms out there that offer multiple links to your site within days. Google will just see that you are trying to manipulate their algorithm and bin your site. It really is not worth it.
Although links are the most important, it is pointless linking to a site that is not geared up to sell to customers and increase your productivity. So you need to make sure your website is built in such a way that you capture all potential customers that have the intention on buying not just browsing. Use common sense, for example what would you like if you was a customer on this site?
Finally understanding SEO is really not that difficult but applying the right techniques in a timely and disciplined manner is so learn, learn and learn. Then once that’s done apply – after all what is the point of learning stuff if you don’t use it!
