In our last blog post we considered the importance of SEO and the importance of selecting a domain name with good keywords for your potential market and a brief overview of keywords for page selection. As promised, in this blog post we will give you some strategies to implement on your own website and some basic pratical advice when considering your SEO strategy.
The three areas we will discuss in this post are : –
Long Tail Keywords
Linking
Optimizing for vertical searches
What is long tail keywords?
Long tail keywords are the keywords people use less to find a particular subject so in my case I would probably like to use ‘web designer’ or ‘brand designer’ as a potential keyword but the competition for these words from other companies that have been around for a long time will probably already be using this keyword and to compete for page one of search engine websites is going to be extremely difficult if I choose to use this keyword. I would recommend thinking ‘outside the box’, for example is ‘web designer in Liverpool’ as competitive? Or what about ‘ unusual brand design’. Its about really sitting down and thinking what keywords could be powerful and not as common as the most obvious first choices? Sit down and write down all the words you can think of to do with your company or that particular page, use a thesaurus if you need to, just take your time, it will be worth it.
Not only is important to include these keywords in your search engine optimization but you must en devour to use the keywords in your content on that page that the search engine is being directed to. Not only this but make sure that most of the content is relevant to whatever the keyword you have used relates to, this will give your web page more credibility and it will also be better for the people searching for you on Google.
I’ve got some great keywords in my content and in my SEO plan but i’m still not as high in the search engine listings as I would like to be. What else do I need to think about?
Linking. You need to start putting lots of links from others websites to your own and vise versa. The WWW stands for world wide web and it is exactly that that will make your website traffic increase. Becoming a point in the web that is informative to users in the content you provide but also being relevant to finding other content that is similar to your own.
Linking works best if you have a link from your website to the specified website and then a recipient link back to your site, this gives you more credit in the search engine rankings and will help boost you up the ladder for your chosen keywords.
A really sneaky tip ! This website allows you to look at your competition and see where they are linking to and from, you should add links to your own websites that they are on and then find some more, the more links you have the better and always try to have more than your competitors.
Pictures speak a 1000 words but they also speak to search engines!
Lastly, have you considered the power of your images? Yes they make your website look beautiful like the Mona Lisa but they have another purpose, they have what we web designers call an “alt tag” and this alt tag can be filled with important key words. Have you ever used Google images to find an image of your favorite movie star? This is how you find them, the alt tag keywords!
Video killed the radio star
Not only images are powerful SEO tools, video is a relatively untapped marketing tool that is very powerful in showing customers what you provide in a fun and informative way, at the end or start of the video you can have links to your website if they are interested in what the video says and videos tend to go viral via Facebook so make it fun or interesting and you are bound to attract new customers.
Again this is just the tip of the iceberg and there is plenty more to think about when developing your SEO, its a very interesting subject and worth studying if you are serious about web design or making your companies on-line presence and conversions thrive.