3 Simple Secrets of Search Engine Optimization
What are 3 Simple Secrets of Search Engine Optimisation? Simple because its just so easy. Secret since its so dead easy, that people don’t spend the time doing it, nor doing it appropriately.
SearchMasters rank top for the search phrase Search Engine Optimisation on NZ’s Google.co.nz. They train web site developers and individual clients, as well as SEO’ing and internet marketing a large number of web sites. The majority of websites that SearchMasters are asked to help, fail in these three simple secrets.
- Search phrase selection
- Adding the search phrases to the head of the document
- Adding to the content of the page
While there are a large number of other things that are needed for proper Search Engine Optimisation, the above should be the 1st steps to search engine optimising any web page on a website. Too many people focus firstly on in-bound links, and yet the words on their pages are improperly targeted. With in-bound links strategy, you need to target the phrases selected, and have them as link text. But without first choosing the proper key words, inbound link building is not worth much.
1. Search Phrase Selection
What words are people Googling for – use the Google Keyword Selection tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- pick the country that you are targeting
- pick “exact” match – not broad match since you are after traffic for the exact phrase
- sort by the “Local Search Volume” column
Think about regionalisation – your country, city, region, suburb name in the search phrase
Think about categorization – what are the categories that your services or products fit into.
Competition Analysis
Search on your specific country’s Google domain (ie Google.com, or Google.ca, etc) and use the SEO Tools for Firefox tool.
I set the SEO for Firefox tool to show Google PR with an automatic 1 second update, and Yahoo site links as the same.
I think about my clients website and its present Google PR and reported incoming links, and assess against the competition’s PR and incoming links. Am I able to get the client into the top ten? Or is there an alternative phrase that maybe has less traffic, but is easier to achieve.
What search phrases per page
Pick the most competitive, but attainable search phrases for the homepage – the general category that you are selling your goods or services into.
Pick 1 more page of your site as a second page for each of the targeted home page search phrases. This gives you the possibility of an indented result for the Google search – 2 results out of 10 for a normalusual google search. Having a page that is able to be an indented result will often lift the ranking of your main page even if the 2nd page is not showing.
If you are an shopping cart website, think about all the other alternate categories that your products could fit into. Create 1 page for each search phrase or groups of key words.
2. Adding the search phrases to the head of the document
- page title
- meta description
Title
Google shows 70 characters for the meta title of each page in its usual results. If you have over seventy characters, it cuts off at the closest word, and adds 4 characters ” …” one space and three dots. If adding those characters takes it over the seventy characters, then it cuts off another word from the end of the title.
Therefore if you keep to the max 70 characters in the title, you keep the highest level of control over what Google shows, and you have the maximum number of your characters showing.
The title is one of the most important parts of Search Engine Optimization in as much as everything is important. There can only be one “1st word” in a title. Do a Google search, and generally you will see the search phrase move to the left, the lower on the search results you look.
So often website owners add the business name to the front of their title. It should be the search phrase that comes first, then the brand name/website name at the end IF/IF and only if there is room for it.
For shopping cart web sites, you can have a programmed formula for the meta title – the product or category of the web page.
Meta description
Google shows 155 characters of the meta description if you search for single/double/triple word phrases. For longer search phrases, Google will show longer snippets. For instance for a 5 word search phrase it can show up to around 240 characters.
I prefer to keep my meta descriptions to the max 155 characters. Otherwise, Google cuts off the snippet and adds the ” …” space and three dots at the end, thereby cutting off some words. If a long search phrase is searched for, then I let Google pick the snippet from the 155 character meta description, plus words on the page.
The meta description is not used for ranking a website (it has zero weighting in the algorithm). But a good meta description will get you clicks.
Use the main search phrases from your title and add a USP for your domain.
An excellent meta description means a good snippet on Google, and more clicks even for lower search engine rankings.
3. Adding to the content of the page
H1
I have a formula that says have an H1 then an opening paragraph. The H1 signifies that the content is starting, and helps distinguish between the footer, menus, header etc of the page. I have a simplified version of the main keyword phrases – just one of the search phrases of the page title. Simple and readable. Like “SearchMasters – SEO Consulting / SEO Training”
Opening paragraph
So often I find that people are targeting a search phrase, yet that phrase is not included in the content of the web page. The EXACT phrase needs to be on the page. Since the home page is very powerful, you can have phrases that are related to the title, in the content of the page and get good rankings for them. For instance “Search Engine Optimization” might be in the title of your page, but you would also be able to get ranked for the British spelling “Search Engine Optimisation”, or “Search Engine Optimization Consultant”, or a regional “City Search Engine Optimisation” …
Since you can not get all your phrases into the opening paragraph, you might require extra paragraphs to keep it readable. You do not want to keyword stuff.
You need at least say 250 characters of text including the main keyword phrases with no links in that text. The opening paragraph content of a page should be “The Answer”, not directing to another page that has “The Answer”. Further down the document you certainly can have links to other resources.
If you have too small an amount of unique text as compared to header/footer/menu text, then your page is less likely to get cached and ranked on Google. Ecommerce sites
Don’t use your header/footer/menu text as text that you are trying to get a page ranked for. That text is not unique to any one page on your site, and is therefore not proper user information in the eyes of Google.
Unique text
You need unique words around the 1st instance of your keyword phrase in text on the page. If you are using a suppliers description for a category or product, add some auto generated text as your opening paragraph
like “Purchase productname on bestshopping, the place for all your cheap productname.”
What does “Unique” mean? Google for multiple words putting quote marks around the search phrase and the word before and after that phrase. That specific phrase ought to be unique for your website. But often you will find that other sites have copied it. So change your opening paragraph formula, or change the words before and after your search phrase, and make the content unique once again. When others copy your content Google will often not rank you as high. Sites that are not very powerful will suffer in the rankings more than powerful sites that get copied.
I am often having to rewrite meta descriptions and content for my clients DriveNZ Car Rental Auckland highly competitive website. When you rank high on Google for popular phrases like in the car rental industry, lots more people copy your content, and rankings can often go down when too many people copy your websites content.
So there you have it -Search Engine Optimisation’s Three Simple Secrets. Follow the simple secrets of SEO, and you will have a good base for adding incoming links into your website and ranking high on Google and the other search engines.
Michael Brandon is a leading NZ Search Engine Optimisation consultant training web developers, and website owners, and Search Engine Optimising websites worldwide.
