Simon Turner

The Beginners Guide to SEO

 

So what is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation is the art/science of making a website rank well in the search engines to increase visitors to that website. It’s also the single most important online marketing practice to be aware of (queue comments disagreeing with that one!)

If you’re just setting off in the world of online marketing you need to get to grips with SEO, and I strongly recommend you become as knowledgeable as possible about it. Luckily the basics are pretty straight forward, and if your website isn’t in a competitive industry you can get some big wins by getting the basics right.

So firstly a simple summary of how Google works:

Google crawls a website and adds it to it’s index. When it crawls a site it ‘reads’ all the content, and even the images to understand what the site is all about. Then when somebody performs a search Google decides what the most relevant websites are for that search. The content and structure of your site are know as ‘on site’ ranking factors.

Google doesn’t only base it’s rankings on what it find on your site though. It looks at how many other websites link to yours, and the quality of the websites that link to you. These external links are known as ‘off site’ ranking factors. Links are widely considered the most important of google’s ranking factors, particularly when targeting competitive keywords.

How to get started with SEO:

1) Keyword research:

Before you start optimising you site you need to know what keywords you are aiming to rank for. The factors you want to consider are:

a) The search frequency of a keyword. There’s no point ranking for a term that nobody searches for.

b) The competitiveness of the keyword. Look who ranks for a keyword, check out their link profile and consider if you are going to be able to compete. For example there’s probably very little point in a new website targeting a terms like ‘Bingo’, ‘Poker’ or ‘cheap flights’ unless you have massive time and financial resources.

c) The relevance of the keyword to your website. You want to rank for terms which are going to achieve your aims. So identify what you want a visitor to do on your site and what terms are likely to drive relevant visitors.

There are some good free tools for keyword research including Google’s Keyword tool and Google Insights for search.

2) Page title’s:

Arguably the most important onsite ranking factor. Make sure you include your top keyword targets in your page titles. Make every page title on your site different, and as relevant to the page as possible. Remember as well that the page title becomes the main description of your site in the SERPs, so try to word it well to aid a good click through, possibly even including a call to action.

You also need to be aware of meta descriptions and meta keywords, but these are not widely believed to be important ranking factors anymore, at least for Google, so i’m not going to cover them here.

3) Internal linking

You need to tell Google what every page is about, and the best way to do this is with internal links. When you link to a page use descriptive anchor text, ideally your target term for that page. Never link with terms such as ‘Click Here’ as you’ve just missed a great chance to tell Google what that page should rank for.

4) Header tags:

Within your content use header tags. Use one h1Tag per page to tell Google what the main subject of that page is. Use h2, h3 etc for subheadings.

5) Links

You need to build links to your website. This will tell Google your site is well respected and every link works as a ‘vote’ for your site. The better quality the links the better your site appears in the eye’s of Google. To measure the quality of links you can use Google Page Rank as a rough guide, although the importance/accuracy of that is in question. Look at the back link profile of site’s and make your own mind up if it appears to be a quality site. Linkscape is another tool you can use to measure the authority of a site.

Link building is such an important area i’ll write an entire post on the beginners guide to link building over the next couple of weeks.

6) Read Googles guide to SEO. This is the best guide for beginners and will explain best practice SEO in simplistic terms.

This blog post is only a basic guide to help you understand a little bit about SEO. There are a massive amount of other factors to look at but hopefully this will give you a start, and begin to get your site ranking.

If you’re an SEO expert please leave your beginners tips in the comments to help extend this guide.