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Improve search engine rankings – 12 tips for getting started - Part 1

This is the first article in a two-part series written for people who have a web site and want to improve their rankings in major search engines like Google and Yahoo, but are new to the world of “Search Engine Optimisation” (SEO).

The following 6 tips begin the list of 12 basics that you want to get right before you invest additional time and money into improving your search engine rankings. Will following each of these tips send your web site to the top ten ranking of major search engines? No (it’s possible, but unlikely). However if you don’t do the basics well, it will be difficult to secure good rankings for your site.

Following the twelve tips will help you get your website into a good condition for inclusion in search engine results.

For Tips 7 to 12 read Part 2

Tip #1 - Choose the right keywords

Tip #2 - Monitor your search engine rankings

Tip #3 - Create and maintain high quality content

Tip #4 – Use your target keywords throughout your site

Tip #5 – Use your keywords in your page titles

Tip #6 – Use HTML meta tags

Tip #1 - Choose the right keywords

People search for websites using “keywords” – anticipating what keywords your potential customers or desired site-visitors will use is one of the most critical aspects of establishing your website rankings. Your choice of keywords will influence the content you create, how you name your web pages and files, and what sort of sites you seek back-links from. This is a fundamental and important step – and worth putting time and effort into.

For example, if your website sells ladies shoes; you may choose “ladies shoes” as your keywords. You will however find that for common terms like this, there are too many relevant sites for your site to effectively compete. For example, a quick search for “ladies shoes” on Google returns just over 2 million relevant results – a very crowded space indeed. In this instance you would add additional terms to your keyword phrase that narrows down the space in which you are “competing” for attention. If your speciality for ladies shoes is black leather – you could consider a keyword phrase of “black leather ladies shoes”; Testing this on Google shows a results field of 323 thousand ; still large – but better than 2 million.

If your website is representing a shop or service that is available in a particularly geography only, a common way of narrowing down the field of competition is to use the name of city or state that you do business in. For example “black leather ladies shoes Seattle” returns about 72 thousand relevant results from Google. Better than 323 thousand. If your website or business offers service globally, then this approach isn’t really going to work for you – but worth mentioning.

Google offers a useful tool to help you select and analyse keywords – appropriately enough called the “keyword tool”. Another popular tool is the free keywords tool by Wordtracker

How do you tell how “crowded” a space is? Most search engines display the number of relevant results found at the top of the page. Below is an example of where you would find this on www.google.com

Google relevant results count

Choosing your keywords is important, and you can delve deeply into this – with entire books, website and consulting services available in the market to help people choose their keywords. The basic principles however are:

You want a phrase that is not too general – and not too specific;
You can work with multiple keyword phrases; with 3–5 phrases typically providing the best results
The most effective keyword phrases are generally between 2 and 4 words
It is important to test how “crowded” your selected keyword phrase is. Generally, if Google returns more than 100,000 results – you are competing in a crowded space. This may be OK if your site or service is in an industry or topic area that is extremely active.
Try various keywords and combinations, don’t just use your first choice – it is worth experimenting with several dozen.

Tip #2 - Monitor your search engine rankings

One of the first steps, and most overlooked, is to setup a process for monitoring or watching what your search engine rankings are. By watching your rankings over time, you can tell if your improvements are having an impact or not i.e. if you’re improvements are working, you should see your rankings climb over time. Additionally, watching your rankings helps you keep tabs on your competition. Sometimes your rankings can decline, not because you have changed anything, but because other sites have improved while yours has stayed still.

For both reasons – you want to keep an eye on your search rankings.

The simplest way to do this is to manually do a search in Google and Yahoo periodically, and record the results. Many people starting out do this. Increasingly, people are setting up automated processes that will keep track of their rankings for them. These services are generally very low cost. This site (www.rankangel.com) provides this type of service.

Below is an example of a travel website (www.webjet.com.au) that has been monitored for about 5 weeks on Google (Australia). This shows that this site has averaged a ranking of about 7^th (for the three different keywords shown) but at times this has risen to as high as 4^th and dropped as low as 8^th. Example monitoring graph

Looking at what the webmasters of the Webjet site were doing around the dates of 15^th March to 22^nd March may help identify changes that improved the sites ranking for that week.

The second graph below shows the search results for the same website, with the same keywords – but against the Yahoo search engine in Australia. This shows consistently high rankings for 2 of the 3 selected keywords – which is good – however it also shows a decline for the third keyword “online travel” from rankings in the mid 70’s to the 90’s over a couple of days and dropping out of the top 100 altogether shortly thereafter. This may be important for the webmasters of this site to know – and respond to. Yahoo monitoring results

Tip #3 - Create and maintain high quality content

The goal of a search engine is to provide its users with the best and most relevant content it can in response to a query. The ongoing investment and innovation in search engine technology is driving towards making the engines ever smarter at detecting what is “good content” and what isn’t. The single best thing you can do for your search result rankings is to provide high quality content on your site that is relevant to your users and updated periodically (search engines give preference to “fresh content” to old).

Developing high quality content should take most of your time with respect to the things you do to secure good search engine rankings. As a rule of thumb, given all the time you choose to spend on make your site rank well in the search engines, you should spend at least 50% of this time on your content – with the balance of time spread across the other activities described in this article and others to promote your site rankings.

A quick checklist of the things you should think about when developing your content

Articles should be between 300 and 700 words in length
Try to make the articles “topical” – commenting or expanding on issues that are current
Include your keywords in your content
Refresh and update your content regularly – weekly is desirable
Always spell check and grammar check your content
Write your content to secure and hold your users attention. The qualities that you should be striving for when writing your content include thought-provoking, entertaining, informative, comprehensive, well-researched and unique.

A word of warning: You will find plenty of websites and books selling and promoting ways to “trick” search engines into giving your high search result rankings without content. These approaches generally don’t work for long as the engineers behind the search engines learn about them as well – and improve their technology to ignore these “tricks”. The only reliable long term strategy that has been shown to work is to focus on creating high quality content.

Tip #4 – Use your target keywords throughout your site

Search engines need to see your keywords all throughout your site in order to associate your web address with the targeted keywords. Make sure that your home has titles that map exactly ( or very close to ) your selected keywords. Make sure that you have content pages within your site that also use these titles – and also make references to these phrases in the content text. If you have the option of being able to choose a domain name that includes your keywords - even better.

The investment in time ( and potentially money ) in selecting your keyword(s) starts to look a whole lot more important once you realise that you will be shaping your site and its content with these keywords.

Below is a checklist of the things you should do at a minimum with your selected keywords on your site:

þYour home page headings and titles use your keywords (see Tip #5 below)
þThe introductory text on your home page uses your keywords
þPage titles include your keywords
þPage descriptive meta tags include your keywords
þYou have multiple content pages within your site that focus on your keyword topic
þThe picture and graphic files on your site are named using your keywords – and that they have “ALT Text” that includes your keywords

One word of warning – search engines are now smart enough to spot the difference between ‘natural text’ and pages that have “dumped” a whole bunch of keywords together repeatedly. If a search engine thinks you are trying to fool it – it will penalise your ranking rather than help.

Tip #5 – Use your keywords in your page titles

Most search engines rate page title as an important ranking factor. You want your page titles to use or strongly relate to your keywords. The page title is not only important and visible to search engines, but it is also what most browsers will display in the title bar when your page is being viewed – consequently it is what your users / customers will see.

Below is a simple HTML document – showing where the TITLE tag is used to

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Black Leather Ladies Shoes - Seattle</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

<H1>Bob’s Black Leather Shoe Shop for Ladies.... </H1>

</BODY>

</HTML>

You want to make sure that all pages in your site have page titles, and that these titles use your selected keywords. Don’t worry about putting your company name in the page title – your keywords are more important.

Tip #6 – Use HTML meta tags

Most search engines look at a page’s “meta tags” as ranking factors. Meta tags are bits of HTML in the page that provide some descriptive information about the page – but they are not displayed by web browsers.

Like page titles, you want your page titles to use or strongly relate to your keywords. browsers will display in the title

There are two main meta tags that can be important in getting your pages noticed by search engines. They are the “keywords” tag and the “description” tag. They are placed inside the <HEAD> tags of a HTML document – and look like this:

The keywords tag used to be more important than it is today – primarily due to site dumping too many keywords in this tag for it to be broadly meaningful. Despite its decline as a ranking factor – it is still worthwhile ensuring that your pages include this tag and populate it with a small number of well targeted keywords.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Black Leather Ladies Shoes - Seattle</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

<H1>Bob’s Black Leather Shoe Shop for Ladies.... </H1>

</BODY>

</HTML>

The description meta tag can be useful to you because

The description tag can be useful as it is the extended text that will often appear under the your link in search results. You should expand on the information and theme provided in your page title:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE>Black Leather Ladies Shoes - Seattle</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

<H1>Bob’s Black Leather Shoe Shop for Ladies.... </H1>

For Tips 7 to 12 read Part 2