On Internet Business

Optimising a business website for SEO keywords

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Search

Assuming you’ve worked out your keywords, what should you do with them?

Once you’ve identified your keywords – structure them

This means taking the most important two or three, and using them appropriately in your website. The essential places to utilise them are: titles especially the website title, headers, image alt links and in descriptions and article titles. Finally you use all your keywords, not just the high priority ones, in the content pages of your site to reinforce the search engine’s explorations so that your sight looks rich in information relevant to the enquirer.

Keyword Popularity

Use a keyword popularity tool to explore the options for the keywords you’ve identified. This does two things – it offers alternatives to your identified keywords, so that your text doesn’t look keyword heavy and clunky, and it reveals new and linked words that might draw the right kind of business to your site.

Be careful though – just because a word is reckoned to be popular, it also needs to be relevant to your business and your target audience. In the USA, for example, one of the top three words in terms of popularity related to ‘writing’ as a keyword is ‘resume’. So ‘resume writing’ would seem like a good keyword … but if your target audience is predominantly British, it won’t be using that word at all because in Britain people say ‘CV writing’ not ‘resume writing’.

Apply common sense to your choices because there’s no point generating interest that you can’t fulfil, nor in failing to reach a target audience because you’ve chosen the most popular key words rather than the ones that will attract the right people to visit your site so that you can convert them to customers.

Content and Optimisation

Another important point is not to destroy your site’s appearance in favour of keyword optimisation. If you’ve ever visited one of those ‘make a million dollars guaranteed’ type websites and entered a completely circular world where every time you click a link it leads you to another, even more key-word dense page but never to the information you were promised, you know that visitors can lose the will to live, let alone to click, if optimisation is given priority over content.

It’s not enough to have good content alone, and it’s never enough to produce a superbly optimised site without solid content that pleases visitors and allows for a high level of conversions: combining the two is essential to getting the blend right.

Off-Page Optimisation

Off-page optimisation is a series of strategies that allow your website to maximise its chances with the various search engines. The most important tool is linking – you can do this by launching a link campaign, asking complementary businesses to provide links to you as you provide one to them. Other tools are:- directory listings where you have to apply to be included: the most important are DMOZ and Yahoo!; issuing online press releases; article distribution systems; using social networking; blogging and forum posting. All of these give your site a higher profile by making it look more relevant and more substantial, and that moves you up the search engine rankings.

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