Getting Started with SEO

16th
SEP

Posted by Michael under Search

SEO looks like black magic or arcane science to many people who either don’t understand it, or who’ve been ‘sold’ the idea that SEO is something you have to pay somebody to do for you. This isn’t true; although SEO can be time consuming at first, understanding the basics of SEO can help your business thrive, whether you choose to undertake the work yourself or whether you hire in expertise.

The first thing to note is that many of the tools you need to master SEO are actually available to you for free via the internet. This means that you can play around with the concepts and strategies of SEO for yourself without it costing anything except time.

Get cosy with Google

Begin by getting familiar with Google. Love or hate the search engine empire, it’s the biggest driver of online business and you need to work with it to get the kind of visitor rates that can be converted to customers. And because Google provides a service, it helps you get your site high in the Google rankings. To begin, you go to their Webmaster Central pages and register an account so you can begin to benefit from their services. They have an advice section, they show you how to submit a site map that helps Google rank your pages, and even how to write a robots.txt file. The good thing about putting in the effort with Google is that it pays off for all other search engines too.

Work out your keywords

There are three routes to doing this:

1) Ask your customers – find out what they put into a search box to get to the services or products they want to find
2) Ask your staff – what words to they use to describe the business or their jobs, or to communicate with each other. Don’t forget this stage because often there are words that are used within the business that you’ll forget to include in your keywords because you think they are industry specific. As an example, ‘technical’ is not a word that many people would think of as featuring on a running shoes website, but ‘technical clothing’ is a term often used to describe fabrics that wick sweat away from the body, or shoes that contain shock absorbers, so serious runners will often use this terminology in searching for top-of-the-range shoes.
3) Check out the competition – see what words your rivals are using, they often know the best words to drive business to their sites.

You can use a keyword tool to help you find other keywords that are related to the list you produce. Google have Adwords, which can be found via their Webmaster page, or you can use a tool like Spacky which gives you a monthly feed of search volumes on related keywords for Google, Overture/Yahoo and MSN.