Search Engine Optimisation

The first step of an effective Search Engine Optimisation is to understand your target market. This doesn’t mean learning the personal lives of your customers, but determining the specific demographic or bracket of people that you are aiming to sell to. As much as possible, cover all the specific details that you can about this potential customer. Is the customer male or female? What is his or her age clause, educational background or yearly income? The more you know your market, the better you will understand what keywords they will be using to find your site.

When implementing any Search Engine Optimisation campaign consideration should be given to on-site page layout for your site to be properly crawled and indexed by search engine spiders. Correct use of page headers with H1 tags, paragraphs and minimal use of HTML tags such as and images which make it harder for a spider to view the content on the page.

A core element of all Search Engine Optimisation endeavours is keyword research. Understanding who or what your target market is will make it easier to identify what terms will be used to find it. However, since you cannot read minds of your target Internet users, it’s better to use keyword tools in your research. Search engines like Google or Yahoo feature free tools that will not only present you with relevant keywords but will also show you the search rates of each keyword. Remember we are trying to drive more traffic to our website so choose keywords carefully. There is no point being on page 1 of Google for terms that no one searches!

The key to a successful Search Engine Optimisation campaign will be the correct use of content. Content must be unique and relevant to the actual product or service you are selling and not be repeated over numerous pages within your website. Do not be tempted to stuff your keywords in an effort to get the spiders to notice you. Any spamming is frowned upon and could affect your overall position. Try to write content around your specific keywords that you have targeted for each page. Use keyword grouping on pages to avoid the temptation to create repetitive unnecessary internal pages.

Some would say that this is the most important element of Search Engine Optimisation which when combined with good page content can accelerate organic growth. The process can be broken down into two sections: Internal on-site linking and external back-linking.

An internal linking structure is how you can guide a search engine spider around your site easily and effectively. In its simplest form, the use of text navigation menus or hyperlinks on internal pages can be used. Consider suitably positioned anchor text to ensure that when the Search Engine spiders visit your site they are guided from one page to the next.

External Backward links are recommendations from other sites and hence are essential to your overall success. The more relevant links you have directed to specific internal pages the better your website will perform. Forget about quantity it is the quality of the link that counts!