SEO has acquired a reputation as being some kind of dark art practised only by those willing to bow to the dark side. Of course this is not true; SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a skillset like most others which can be learnt and refined over time. Although you may never become an expert and learn skills such as the use of a canonical tag to prevent duplicate content penalties, you can learn the basics fairly quickly and start making some positive changes to your own website.
Over the next few blog posts I’m going to try and run through the SEO basics, at the end of these posts you should be in a position to understand how SEO works and start making change yourself.
The starting point for any SEO project is keyword research. If you don’t get this right then everything that follows is wasted – so pay attention!
In order to attract visitors to your site you need to consider what search terms or keywords they are likely to type into a search engine in order to find you, or similar. Once you have some ideas then you can use the Google keyword tool (or similar) to generate large lists of similar keywords.
The beauty of a tool like the Google Keyword Tool is it does more than simply offer keyword ideas – it tells you how many times these terms are actually typed into the search engine every month!
Now this is brilliant news! You can look at your list and discard keywords where very few searches are made and focus on ones which have high monthly search volumes. You need to be completely honest with yourself here. Don’t be persuaded to select keywords which aren’t closely related to what you offer just because they have a higher volume of searches. So if you sell high-end bespoke kitchens don’t be tempted to include the keyword ‘cheap kitchens’ just because there are lots of searches every month. – you may get the traffic, but you will NEVER convert these visitors. In fact, all it will do is increase your bounce rate i.e. visitors who arrive and then leave directly from the landing page.
The other important element to remember when using this tool is always to select the Exact Match Type.
The tool defaults to broad match type, giving you a wildly overoptimistic volume of searches for each keyword. There are by default three match types –
Broad Match – include the keyword in any order with other words in front, in-between or afterwards.
Phrase Match – includes the keyword written exactly in the way typed, but with other words potentially before and afterwards
Exact Match – the keyword written exactly as typed.
Taking the example exact match “VW dealer Cheltenham” then -
“Best VW dealer in the Cheltenham area” – is a broad match
“Best VW dealer Cheltenham” - is a phrase match
A more advanced keyword research process would then compare keyword volumes against the competition, looking for high volume searches with low levels of competition - in the vast majority of cases it is likely that you would still choose to focus on the same keywords after this has been completed though.
Armed with this information you can start to think about optimising your site for these keywords.
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