SEO
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation, simply put, is things you do to your website to make it more appealing to search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing.
Once you have made your website, head over to Google and register for Google Webmaster. Google Webmaster allows you to add your site and site map to Google, whilst collecting data on your site.
From inside Google Webmaster, you can track your sites performance and see how it ranks on Google.
To make your website Search Engine friendly we first have to optimise it.
It's not as simple as making a website and waiting for visitors.
You can do this, but it will take a long time to get where you need to be to make money. All search engines will eventually find your site (fast if it's optimised) but the steps we take to optimise it increase this by 800%.
SEO steps
Keywords
To optimise your website you need to think of keywords for your site.
What are keywords?
Keywords are the words you type into Google search to locate a site that is relevant to your search.
All the websites that come up (other than the ads) are optimised for that keyword.
Google's robots have scrawled through these websites and found your keyword many times throughout the pages of the sites and so they are showing you as results to your question.
We need to pick a keyword that is relevant to our site.
Google keyword tool is great at helping us find one.
We also have to look at our competition.
Picking a broad keyword like 'silver jewellery' is a great one as it gets between 1000 and 10000 searches a month in the UK alone.
That's a lot of potential customer right?
Unfortunately, as 'silver jewellery' is such a high ranking search term, we must remember that sites such as H Samuel, Links of London Tiffany & Co etc will be raking on the first page of Google for that term.
Their sites are fully SEO'd, have thousand of Backlinks, have been trading forever and have thousands of visitors daily.
All of these add to SEO, so it is 'very unlikely' that Google will rank us to Page one of Google for that search term over them.
So, we need to rank for a search term that is likely to get us to page one or close.
How many times have you typed into Google a sentence instead of just one or 2 words?
Let's say on your silver jewellery page you have a section for wedding rings, competitively priced. A phrase someone may type into Google is 'cheap silver wedding rings'.
There are 4 words here instead of the 2 we started with and more accurate to the page you are promoting.
Google keywords say this gets 10,000 - 100,000 hits a month.
This is more than the 'cheap jewellery' keyword!
Play around with the keyword tool and choose keywords that are relevant to your pages.
Once you have your keywords per page we need to Optimise them. To do this we are going to add the keywords to your page as often as you can for it to make sense.
So if you have writing on your page you need to have your keywords repeated on the page a few times in sentences.
E.g
Cheap silver wedding rings (keyword) - Title
Are you looking for Cheap silver wedding rings (keyword)?
You've come to the right place. Buy exclusive cheap silver wedding rings (keyword) at discounted prices today! Etc
If you also have pictures on your site we can also add keywords to these. Simply change the name of your pictures to your keyword.
You may have to do this on your computer and re upload it to your site for this to take effect.
If you have an option of adding Alt text to your pictures add your key word in there also. Making your keywords 'bold' will also highlight your keyword to your reader as well as the Google robots, but no need to bold every keyword you insert. 10% of them is fine.
It's a good idea to have a few keywords per page, use Google keyword tool for some ideas.
Backlinks
Backlinks are links back to your site, placed on another website.
Backlinks are favoured with search engines because it shows that you have popularity not just with customers but with other websites out there who are linking (recommending) back to you.
Have you ever been on a site and they recommend something like we did previously when we spoke about Google keywords tool?
We gave you a link so it is easy for you to find them. This is a backlink (not that Google need to gain popularity!)
The more you have the higher Google rank you.
But, you can be penalised for having too many spam backlinks (if you buy them). If you want to purchase backlinks only do so with high authority websites.
What does this mean?
Every website has an domain authority ranking, you can check yours at Alexa.com.
The ranking is on a scale from 0 - 100.
The higher the domain ranks the more authority it has on the web. Therefore having backlinks from higher authority website are more favourable to search engines than low ones.
When your looking to buy backlinks always remember to get high authority backlinks and that it takes 2-4 months to see a difference in your page ranking. Goggle robots, which are always crawling the web, have to find each backlink and register it on the different sites, before they can transfer and up rank your site, so do not expect immediate results.
You can buy high authority backlinks on fiverr.
Backlinks can also be manually added by other sites reviewing you, recommending you or by yourself manually. We will show you how to do this with step by step instructions. (Sign up to our newsletter to be the first to know when it is available).
Technical problems
Your site needs to be at optimum health to rank well with Google. You need to check regularly if your site has any spelling mistakes, loading issues, broken links etc.
You can get your readers to help by putting a notice on each page to say - "If you find any broken links or discrepancies on our website please let us know so we can continue to bring you FREE, useful up to date information".
Alexa.com runs advance diagnostics which are beneficial for your site, so run once a month, if possible. It is a paid service with 7 days FREE and Alexa’s Site Audit will clearly explain all the action items you need to address and why.
SEO is a fundamental principle for any website! Download our SEO yourself handbook today for more information.