Evohosting

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Guide Pt.1

Posted by: Tim M. // // May 29th, 2009 // Internet Marketing

Part 1 – Keyword Research, Planning & Harmonising

Keyword Research

This is very important – you MUST do keyword research before starting your site (ideally, before you even register your domain). First, you should work out which keywords people will use to search for your site so that you know which keywords you want to target.

Tip: Search engines can put an emphasis on keywords in your domain, so, if possible, put your keyphrase or a keyword in your domain name. (eg, domain name ‘evohosting.co.uk’ for the keyword of ‘hosting’).

How do I research keywords? This is pretty easy, and there are many tools to help you. Firstly, think about what your site offers, and think as your potential customer may think. If you’re looking for a taxi company in Birmingham, what are you likely to type into Google? ‘taxi birmingham’ springs to mind here. View the sites in your search results, and then ‘view source’ on the websites of the top few results to see what their titles, keywords, descriptions, heading tags say.

Also, get the SeoQuake plugin for IE and Firefox — it makes life a lot easier! SeoQuake provides you with useful information like a site’s Google PageRank and the number of sites that link to it in Yahoo (back links are important and I’ll talk about them, and much more, in another post)

http://www.seoquake.com/

Once you have SeoQuake up and running, open up Excel, go through a few sites, and note down the details listed above for each of the more popular pages on each site — this should give you an idea of what you should be doing.

Example

I’ve typed ‘Birmingham Taxi’ into Google and have come up with http://toataxis.net/

Here are the stats for the homepage (you should make a document with your competitors’ sites which looks something like the below.  Do it for each important page on their site.)

Title: TOA Taxis – Birmingham taxi service and taxi company West Midlands

Keywords: taxi, taxis, cab, taxicabs, cabs, birmingham taxis, taxis in birmingham, tour birmingham, birmingham tours, TOA taxis, T.O.A taxis, need a taxi in birmingham, airport taxis, chauffeur, courier

Description: Traditional Birmingham taxis available for airport transfers, tours and long journeys

You can see the meta tags (title, keywords, description) are SEOized towards ‘Birmingham Taxi’ and variants quite heavily – they’ve missed a number of important factors on their page (such as they haven’t used their keywords in their heading tags, their meta tags are the same for each page, and a number of other things).

Other keyword research tools

SpyFu.com (pay site) allows you to see which keywords your competitors pay for, the amount they pay, and the organic results for keyword terms. It shows you what other terms your competitors are using for organic search results, as well as related terms and related concepts.

When you put a URL into SpyFu.com, you will be able to see your competitors’ daily ad budget, what they’re paying for ‘Pay Per Click’ (PPC) ads, their competition, who they’re competing with for ads, the other domains they own, and the search terms they come up for. If Spyfu doesn’t know about the URL you enter, it will automatically add it to its database and start ranking it in the next month.

In a nutshell, SpyFu.com gives you the ability to beat your competition by understanding what they are/aren’t doing so you can do it better.

Another site (pay site) that is very similar to SpyFu.com is SemRush.com. Also KeywordSpy.com gives you a free trial, so it might be worth giving that a try! KeywordSpy.com has some very good reviews, however, SpyFu.com is the only one I have personal experience with.

Planning & Harmonising

Once you have a list of data related to your competitors’ sites, you’ll want to start creating a list of data related to your own site.

Important: Aim to SEOize each page on your site towards a specific key phrase, and work out the structure of your site (the pages you’ll have and the URLs where they will be found). Figure out exactly which title, description, and keywords you’ll have on each page, and never duplicate your titles keywords and description. You can make them similar to allow the pages to complement each other, but they should not be exactly the same.

Example

If I were to make a site for a Taxi company in Birmingham, then I’d think about the keywords people might type into Google and make specific pages for them.

Homepage > http://taxibirmingham.co.uk – I’d SEOize this towards ‘Taxi Birmingham’, that would be featured in the Meta Tags (Title, Description, Keywords), and I’d also put it into the page as a H1 (heading 1) tag.

Example Title: Taxi Birmingham | Birmingham Taxis – Taxi Company in Birmingham

I’d then make sub pages from that particular page. If I decided I wanted to sell tours of Birmingham, I’d make a page with the url http://taxibirmingham.co.uk/tours-of-birmingham/

For the tours page, I’d put the title as: Tours of Birmingham | Birmingham Taxis – Taxi Tours in Birmingham

This would complement my home page and also be specifically SEOized towards the actual page I’m working on now without looking too spammy. I’d also make my keywords similar to those of  the homepage, however, I’d add more about tours.

Handy Tips:

Use a CMS: Use WordPress or Joomla to build your site — it make updating the site much easier, and it will also make it easier for you to have control over your web page URLs and your meta tags (when compared to editing individual pages in Dreamweaver or Notepad). We’ve written a blog about how to create web pages in WordPress, so check that out if you need some help — WordPress is the perfect platform for building an SEOized site for people with little or no technical knowledge.

Bottom Menu: Make a bottom menu which appears on every page and contains each of your important pages, including your homepage. Also, you’ll want to make each menu title a keyword. (Take a look at the bottom of our homepage, and you’ll see what I mean!).

Make a Site Map Page: List all of your important pages in your Site Map page. Also, be sure to include a description of each page — DO NOT cut and paste text from the pages you’re linking to!  You can easily create new text by rephrasing what you’ve  already written on the destination page.

Google: Once your site is up and running, sign up to Google Webmaster Tools, generate a site map, and submit your site map to them. Also, sign up to Google Analytics and enter your Analytics code into your website to start tracking visitors.

Handy Site Map Tool for WordPress: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

Add Google Analytics to WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analyticator/

You can find more information on all of this by visiting sites like SEOMoz.org.  The information provided in this blog is just a summary of what I’ve learnt over the last couple of years, and it has worked very well for us! However, this is only the beginning — there are many more elements to SEOizing your site, and we’ll be covering them soon, so stay tuned!

Tags: google webmaster tools, joomla seo, keyword research, keywordspy, make sitemap, search engine optimisation, semrush, seo, seomoz, seoquake, spyfu, spyfu review, wordpress seo