SEO Basics: Part 2 – Basic SEO techniques

On-site optimisation

This is the first stage that most SEO’s go through when they start optimising a project – a quick analysis of the pages meta tags. These are the tags that provide the first clues to the search engine of what the site is about and where to rank it. There are 3 main tags that you must pay attention to, the title, ‘keyword’ and ‘description’ meta tags. They look like this:

Placing these tags in the section of your web page is the first basic step to telling the search engine what your site is about. Choosing a short description – no more than a few sentences and for your keywords ensure that you include relevant keywords (separated by comma’s) and their variations but ensure that you do not over use this.

If you have a large website, it is important to avoid duplicate title and descriptions, this is most common with large database driven sites. You content will not rank anywhere near as well as it should if you do not have relevant page titles and meta tags throughout your site. This can be tricky if have a static page site, but with many popular content management systems – such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal there is already a vast array of plugins available to help you to achieve this.

Link building

Building inbound links (links pointing to your domain) will help you to increase your Pagerank – this is the technology used by Google to grade websites and many of the other search engines use this as a basis for their rankings. The ideal way to build links organically and ethically is through directory submissions and reciprocal link exchanges with related sites. Contacting site owners directly proposing a link exchange is one of the best ways to go about this, with a friendly personal email. Many website owners will be happy to exchange links if your site is related to yours and you have a good amount of quality content. Usually you will just need to provide the anchor text (the text that the user clicks on to visit your site) this text should always contain your main keywords. When Google re-indexes the outbound linking site it will see that the site owner has linked to your site and in the eyes of the search engine, will increase the importance of your site gradually.

Paid links may seem like a good way to go about this, but the Google Algorithm is incredibly intuitive and will eventually pick up on this, getting a few good quality links from reputable, related sites is worth more than hundreds of worthless auto generated backlinks.

Our SEO services are unique in terms of our link building expertise. We have a large portfolio of partner websites and existing relationships. This enables us to create a completely bespoke SEO strategy for our clients.

Tools and resources

In order for you to gauge the success of your SEO efforts you can track your visitors using Google Analytics, this will give you a the statistics with regards to specific visitor numbers and which visitors arrived via Google and other search engines, referring sites or direct traffic. Installing Google Analytics is as easy as embedding a script into your websites <head> section. Opening a webmaster tools account will allow you to view the approximate number of impressions your site has daily (the amount of times it appears) in the search engine results for specific keywords. This is an extremely useful diagnostic tool in the SEO process and will feed you lots of other information about your site such as load times, HTML suggestions and inbound links.

Sitemaps

Creating a sitemap and submitting this to Google is one of the single most important steps you can take to ensure that Google index’s as many of your pages as possible. A sitemap is usually an XML file created by the webmaster giving the receiving search engine a complete list of all of the pages on your website. It has been shown in many SEO benchmarks that this speeds up the indexing of content dramatically, there are plenty of tools available to create a sitemap, your CMS might even have an inbuilt functionality, but if there are plenty of free web based generators such as this one: www.xml-sitemaps.com. Once you have your XML sitemap, upload this via FTP into the root directory of your webserver and through Webmaster tools, you can submit your sitemap.

Professional SEO services

These basic techniques will help you to get started, for more information on an SEO campaign built around your business needs contact seo@vibrocentric.co.uk. SEO can actually save your business money through cutting your advertising costs and ensuring that your target audience always find your site.