James Cope says he will visit E-Traders 21 October in Bournemouth. I've asked him if he can talk to us on SEO.
by James Cope, Fareham, Hampshire, BusinessLink:-
Tonight I will be running a search engine check workshop for delegates at Business Link’s open evening in Fareham.
The session is aimed at giving attendees the tools and techniques to be able to perform a basic search engine assessment of their website. For search engine success it is widely accepted that onsite optimisation accounts for only around 20% of the activity required, with the other 80% contributed by offsite online activity.
With that in mind to assess your onsite optimisation follow these basic steps:
- Measure current visitor levels
- Undertake search phrase/keyword research
- Select search phrases per page
- Check that those terms appear onsite
- Tweak & measure
1. Measure Visitor Levels
Before you start the journey it is good to know where you are starting from! If you do not have already I would suggest getting some sort of statistics package configured to the site. A package such as Google Analytics gives key information such as the number of visitors, the sites that are referring traffic and the search terms used.
2. Undertake Keyword Research
The information that your statistics give are a great start, however they do not tell the whole story. Keyword research tools also support the process giving suggestions of alternatives that if optimised for may attract higher visitor levels than your current terms.
3. Select Search Phrases
Tip here is to consider your visitors buying process, what terms do they use to research your products/services and how do these change when they have completed research and are looking to buy or enquire. Look at the pages of the site and determine which best support that pages theme. Try and limit to a single core phrase and perhaps two sub phrases.
4. Check Site Elements
With the phrases chosen it is now time to check that these appear in your onsite elements, the main elements I would consider would be
- meta title
- meta description
- header tags
- alt tags
- body text
- internal hyperlinks
That is not an exhaustive list but covers the basics, to get an up to date list of some of the main ranking factors visit the SEOmoz blog http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
You do not need to do this process long hand there are tools that can help, the spider simulator in the attached presentation is one. There are also software tools such as webceo and internet business promoter, both of which have free versions that give limited functionality that can be useful.
5. Tweak & Measure
Once you’ve identified the gaps in those important elements, dip into the site coding to add them in. You may or may not be able to do this as it can depend if you have created the site yourself, or the limitations of the content management system provided. If not talk to your developer about the changes and discuss how you can manage this on an ongoing basis until you are happy with the results.
Tip here is to give it some time for changes to be spotted by Google and for them to take effect. Look at the trend your statistics are showing, and don’t over tweak when you have a model that is working. Continue to build on the process bringing in offsite online activity that make the difference, turning the site from a well optimised but unvisited site to a well optimised centre of information with good traffic levels. But that’s another seminar topic!
For those that attended, I hope you found the session useful attached to this post is the Business Link Search Engine Optimisation Workshop presentation as promised.
As discussed David Lakins @ Key Multimedia has copies of the onsite and offsite search engine optimisation tip sheets
There is more help on the topic at the Business Link website which has a section on keyword selection and optimisation
Would be interested in hearing from any delegates the effect of any optimisation you undertake, or if you have any other questions please ask away.
