Web masters often quote a study from web usability expert, Jakob Nielsen, that “93 percent of Web users don’t look beyond the first page of search results” when justifying SEO. And they’re absolutely correct. That said many web masters don’t always properly optimise their website for search engines. Instead they make sites for functionality and user experience, which although great in the long run, even if you’ve built a great website, users might not always find it.
1. Make sure the keywords you’re using are appropriate.
One mistake made by people trying to utilize SEO is that they optimise for the wrong keywords. More often than not, the keywords companies use to describe their products are different from the ones consumers use. For example, if we take the rather obvious example that a company might be promoting “portable computers”, but a customer may be searching for a “laptop”. With the wrong keywords, you could be optimising a website for terms with low search volumes. There are tools you can use to gauge whether your keywords will be effective; such as the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, where you can evaluate the most frequently searched keywords and how competitive a keyword is. Set this to exact match and make sure your geolocation is set to the country you want your website to rank within. This will have the most realistic value when comparing predicted traffic against analytics traffic. Lastly, you should take into account the value and competitiveness of your keywords. This can be checked by using a Keyword Effectiveness Index, with either a tool like WEBCEO or wordtracker.
2. Take care when choosing where to place your keywords.
A common mistake webmasters make when implementing SEO is that they place keywords in the wrong place. Target keywords can be stuffed within html tags; h1, title or meta descriptions, which can cause search engines to ignore pages entirely, with the recent panda update. Make sure that you’ve utilized keywords in your page’s title tag and meta description tag, but don’t overdo it – try and write them in an enticing manner with a natural flow, placing adjectives and stop words like is/and/there. Search engines pay particular attention to the title tag of the page to see whether a given page is relevant to a given search query. Try and incorporate keywords inside the body text and make sure that you contextually link out to your key landing pages. This is a good idea as long as you ensure that the keywords fit well with the rest of the text, but again don’t overdo it.
3. Try to gain more external links to your site from other websites.
One of the best ways to boost your search engine rankings is by having your site linked to from another site. If the site citing you is using the keywords you want to rank for, again this is a good idea, but Google penguin has demoted sites that use exact anchor text in order to rank. These days it’s better to link earn, rather than link build, as unnatural links from bad neighbourhoods can pass “negative link juice” from penguinised pages. To gain more external links, ensure that your pages have newsworthy or notable content. Try and keep your blog updated once a week. Once you have made sure of that, diseminate on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter. This will lend your site more credibility. Tell influential journalists and bloggers in the media about your work. Keep repeating this process and you will gradually become an influencer, which will mean in turn, other influencers retweet or a share your content on their profiles.