I suppose Im like a lot of online businesses in that I get bursts where I review the site from an SEO perspective. I’m in the middle of one of those at the moment. Anyway, I’ve been trawling around looking to get some advice – looking at all sorts of videos and articles – written by various SE/SEM experts.
To start with, I use a tool called IBP which I found good to start with and that helps you start SEO’ing your site. One of the functions that I use, is where you compare your site against the top 10 sites in your competing area. The tool looks at your competitors and then analyses your site with theirs and makes suggestions as to how you shoud modify your content so that your site should get better rated.
One of the things it concentrates on is the meta keywords – and checks the frequency and density of these within the body text of your url. However, listening to a whole load of SEO heads, this apparantely isn’t that relevant now. The feeling being that you can stuff your keyword tag with a load of keywords that just aren’t relevant.
However, what IBP and the experts do have in common is the need for a title tage that accurately describes your business (with keywords). And also a meta descritption tag that is meaningful and acts as a “compelling call” to potential customers. The snippet that is displayed in the search Engine is a very important part of your call card. You need to get it righto to make sure you get the right people clicking through and that it offers them a reason to do so. There’s an interesting video by Matt Cutts on youtube on this topic.
Other important factors are external links to your website – thats one of the things we all know – but don’t do enough to get quality links – the consensus seems to be DO not buy links or use link factories – Google don’t like it – as is evidenced by Matt Cutts and videos that can be found, again, on Youtube.
One of the things that Matt does say is worth doing is to start a blog and get involved in whatever coversation that is of interest to you and (pertains tangentally to your business). Google loves blogs – and he seems to particularly like wordpress. You can get a wordpress blog up and running and integrated to your site easily – and apparently version 2.3 aggregates blog postings - which google likes.
Another SEO expert (whose video I saw on YouTube) says that he doesnt concentrate anymore on fiddling around with keyword densities etc.. that instead he researches the correct keywords that businesses should use (and he seemed to suggest that he spent the majority of his time at this). He also focused on optimising digital PR for SEO using keywords – and pushing it out to thebest wire agencies. And of course quality link building – 1000 poor ones are not as good as 10 excellent ones.
On keywords – it takes time to realise what works well – setting up your googleAdwords account and analysing results is a useful way of getting a feel for what people are searching plus there’s a whole load of tools to use.
Thats all I’ve time for this evening – hope this was of some help.
