Get noticed - SEO site tips!

Everyone wants to maximise the chances of their firms website featuring prominently on Google Michael Heraghty outlines ten tips to help your site get noticed, as featured in the Irish Sunday Business Post Newspaper.

1. Decide which phrases to target. Before you can optimise your site for Google or any search engine, you have to decide what search phrases you want to be found for. Use the free Google Keyword Tool (type 'Keyword Tool' into Google) to find out what phrases people have typed into Google recently.
2. Don't get fixated on being number one for a certain phrase. Don't get hung up on targeting the most obvious or most searched for phrases, which will therefore be the most difficult to achieve top spots for, especially in competitive industries.
3. Match target phrases to landing pages. Look closely at a set of Google search results. You will see that for any particular search query, Google returns a list of pages, not sites. Every page on our site is a potential way in, or 'landing page'for users - you need to ensure that every page is optimised. Target no more than three.
4. Add more pages.Since Google finds pages, the more pages in your site, the more chance you have of appearing in Google's results. Don't add pages if they make the site look bad or if you can't maintain them.
5. Make sure that Google can reach each page on your site. To find out whether Google is able to crawl your site (for inclusion in its search results) type "site:www.yoursitesname.com" into its search bar. The result should be a list of all the pages on your site, including documents such as PDF's and Word documents. Check whether the number of results is what you expected. If not, Google may be unable to access all of your website. Various technical problems may prevent Google from indexing your pages, such as heavy use of Flash multimedia or images. Whatever the issue, get your web designer to fix it, and allow Google to access your entire site, so that you can get listed.
6. Put your target phrase(s) into your page titles. The 'page title' - the text in the blue bar along the top of the browser - is rarely noticed by users, yet this is the most important place to put your keywords. The page title is also used in Googles search results as the text that links to your page. It's important to write page titles with the goal of enticing Google searchers to click, and not to simply write lists of keywords. Work your target key phrases into your page title, and write a different page title for each page. Note: do not confuse the meta description tag with meta keyword tag.The meta keywords tag, while not harmful to your SEO efforts, is ignored by Google.
7. Put your target phrase(s) into a heading and regular text on the page. At this point, your target phrase should be in the page title and themeta description of your landing page. Now, include the same phrase inat least one heading on the page. This is a visible heading on the page, and in the source code will be denoted by a HTML heading tag. Include the phrase in regular text at least once elsewhere on the page. If you have genuine reasons to include the phrase more often than this, that is fine: just try to make sure that you include it at least once in each to improve your chances of getting picked by Google.
8. Get quality, relevant links to your website. All of the above, count for nothing if you do not have any links to your pages. Acquiring links from others is not easy, however, as website owners have come to understand that links have an SEO value. Nevertheless, you need links from websites with similar themes or containing similar keywords to yours. They must also be websites of good quality - that is, they must be listed reasonably high in Google(first few pages) for at least one or more of the phrases you are targeting. While it is worth exchanging links with quality, relevant websites, Google prefers if you have not had to reciprocate the link.
9. Continue working on your SEO strategy over time. Sites that perform best in Google are usually those that consider SEO to be an ongoing activity, not just a once off. Actions that you should review continually include reviewing and revising your main page titles and descriptions. Updating content (Google likes sites that are updated regularly) and adding pages to add more keywords(blogs or news sections are a good way to do this.

 

By Michael Heraghty founder of Heraghty Internet

www.heraghty.net