Junior SEO

So you have your website set up and want to know where to begin to push your site up the rankings in a search engine, but where to begin? Hopefully these 3 points will help you get on your way but the most important thing to remember is SEO is no overnight thing, it can take weeks even months before results begin to show. It’s a lot of work but worth it in the end so don’t give up!

I’m going to skip talking about URL optimisation as this is for sites already set up and running, but I will discuss this at a later date.

Keyword research and optimisation

First stage think about what site is about – example
use of tools e.g. google keyword tool, market samurai

First things first you have to think about what keywords you are going to target for your site. Sit down with a pen and pad and write your site title at the top, then a list of words relating to your site.

Then use a tool like Google AdWords Keyword Tool or Market Samurai. These tools will help you find keywords that you may have not thought of before. These tools will also give you the search frequency and competition of that keyword. This is really helpful as it makes it much easier to find a high searched low competition keyword to rank for to get a lot of traffic to your site fast.

Title tag and meta

Title tag – use of keywords
meta description – length use of keywords
meta keywords – not important but worth putting a couple in
picture examples of how its done through html and wordpress using all in one plug in (to later link to post about plug in)

Time for a bit of on-page optimisation! There are many things you can do on page but lets start with the extreme basics – the title tags, meta descriptions and keywords.

Title Tags are the most important of the three to optimise as a well written title tag with good relevant keywords you want to target can help with that push up the rankings. There is a character limit of 60 characters which it’s best to keep to as that’s all search engines will read. Also remember that the title tag will be used in the search engine results page (SERPs) so try to make it readable and always get your website name or brand name in there.

Meta descriptions, like title tags also have a character limit to stick to (160 characters) and again its used in the SERPs so think about what your writing! you want your description to tell someone what the page is all about whilst adding relevant keywords to help get a better position in the SERPs. It’s a delicate balance between making it readable by both the search engines and for us humans reading the description in the SERP thinking which link to click on will be best.

Meta Keywords aren’t that important any more, it doesn’t mean you should ignore them, after all you have done your keywords research! So put 3-5 keywords in the meta description tag for your page. Make them relevant for the page!!

LINK!

This is the most ongoing part of your site optimisation – links. Because if your site is going to be found you need links to it from other sites. Links can be found from pretty much anywhere from adding a link from your Twitter or Facebook profile, to adding it to a directory.

One easy way of building links is to comment on other peoples blogs or forum posts, but don’t spam! be constructive.

Follow/NoFollow

What you may or may not know is links can tell search engine spiders to follow or not follow a link. If a link is set to no follow then no page rank weight is passed on, but people can still click on that link to get to your site. So don’t think that you should avoid no follows, they may bring a lot of commenter’s to your blog, or buyers to your shop etc.

So there you have it, if you have any questions or suggestions, even negative please do get in touch by leaving a comment or sending me a message on Twitter @pinje

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