Basic SEO

SEO is required by every company interested in making a presence online. Today 95% of users start their experience with the internet at a search engine. SEO doesn’t have to be a black magic in the world of online marketing there are some simple rules you can follow to improve your search ranking.

The first thing to do is ask yourself what you want from your website – chances are you have already started planning your SEO even if you don’t know about it – if you have brought a website with the name of your company in the title and you have written some copy that you want users to read you are well on your way. You see, the primary aim of Google is to create a search algorithm that closely resembles what a human does when they see a website. All search engines use metrics like bounce rates (if a user click on and then off again straight away) and keyword relevance to rank websites.

Imagine you were looking down a list of websites that you have searched for and you could see a summary of the website, the name of the website, the URL of the website and the age of the website, your brain would scan through the information and point you to the most appropriate website – algorithms try to do the same thing. Obviously they don’t have the ability to scan through as easily as the brain but they can match a search or search term and keep a record of the websites people click and adjust rankings appropriately. All this means is that telling the truth and treating search engines algorithms like a human brain is likely to improve your search engine rankings.

So after you have brought the domain, and written the first page of copy what do you do next? Write down a list of businesses within your field – if you are a software company write down Microsoft and IBM and EA Games. Get as many company names as possible because the more names you have the better the next point with work. The next step after writing the names is getting rid of most of the names – get rid of the name from different countries, get rid of the name will lay more turnover than you, get rid of the names that can afford to buy and sell your company. You will maybe have two or three left, now search for them and see what is written in their summary. You are building up a profile of similar companies and the keywords they use the market themselves online. As a business your primary keyword is always going to be the name of your company – that is the term most people are going to use when they click through to your homepage, but you will also need 5 other words. These five keywords are going to be the fighting ground in which you will start getting inquisitive business.

The real trick to SEO is finding the right keywords and optimization your site for those – you don’t want keywords that are too popular, don’t optimize for ‘software’ because a million over websites out their will already have done that. You need to be niche, and specific. You should aim to get the same density of keywords on the homepage as you have for the name of your company. If you want you can do the same thing as above, write down all the words you want and then get rid of most of them because they are going to be too hard to fight for.

There are endless SEO resources online. These are three of the best:

• SEOchat
• SEOmoz
• Google Guidelines for quality