SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving your website page rankings in search engines like Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Bing in order to generate new leads, prospects, customers and increase brand awareness.
SEO is also known as free search unlike PPC paid search, however your website needs to be optimised to rank at the top of search engines page listings.Both on-page marketing and off-page marketing techniques are critical to beat your competition by gaining a higher search ranking position to get more leads and increase brand awareness. Getting a high page ranking using on-page marketing and off-page marketing is not a black art.Instead it is a systematic process that is broken into three core areas.
- Build a site that is easy for search engines to find and index
- Write website content that contains keywords that customers use when searching for your product or service
- Locate important websites that are similar in topic to your own and get them to link to you
On-Page Marketing:
HTML Meta Tags:
Build a site that is easy for search engines to find and index
Page Title:
Ensure your title is explicit and contains your most important keywords. Also that each page has a unique title which accurately describes the content which ensures search engines treat each page separately to improve page ranking. The web page title is the most important meta tag and should therefore contain the maximum 60 characters (spaces included). This tag should contain descriptive characters in a human readable form which are also friendly to search engines. Less than 60 characters will make the page less optimised and more difficult for search engines to index and rank.
Meta Description:
Meta descriptions allow you to influence how your web pages are both described and displayed in search results. When you see one of your website pages in Google results page this is the content that appears below the title link. This tag content can be written like up like a paid search ad to promote the unique page of your website. The meta description can be optimised to contain 160 characters. Copy writing that ensures your meta description is explicit and contains your most important keywords. We also ensure that each page has a relevant unique meta description.
Header Tag:
Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use special tags in their HTML. These tags help human readers read the content as well as search engine spiders better understand the content on a page and what is most important. Heading tags help signal to the search engines what the web page is about.
Content is King:
Write website content that contains keywords that customers use when searching for your product or service. Create unique content which is relevant and interesting to the searcher increases engagement and also encourages other related authoritative sites to link to you. Websites should arrange content into separate pages to cover each theme and subtopics. This makes the content easier to navigate for the reader and search engine to rank and index. Keywords for themes and subtopics should be contained with the text to help search engines index and rank content. Meta tags can then also be created to differentiate content throughout the site.
Blogging:
This keeps your content fresh and increases your Google crawl frequency and rankings This is also a way to reach your target audience with your thoughts, opinions, and offerings on relevant topics and let them participate interactively in the discussions through posts.. Create and update your Blog regularly with new posts and give your site visitors the freedom to post comments.
XML Site Map:
This sitemap is for Search engine bots, which contains the list of URLs of your website. This helps search engine bots/crawlers to crawl your website easily and quickly. To ensure indexing by search engines the sitemap should also be manually entered into Google Webmaster site tools and also Microsoft Bing Webmasters & Yahoo Search site explorer.
Robots.txt:
A robots.txt file allows you to restrict the access of search engine robots that crawl the web, and it can prevent these robots from accessing specific directories and pages, or even your whole website. It also specifies where the XML sitemap file is located.
Off-Page Marketing:
Locate important websites that are similar in topic to your own and get them to link to you.
Backlinks
Also known as link building or referrals, this is the most influential area in search ranking. Analyze competitor websites and link building campaign to get backlinks from authoritative sites within your industry and topics. Also apply link building methods such as article publishing, directory submissions and linking from social bookmarking sites.
Diretory Listings
Alexa Listing: Dmoz Listing: A multilingual open content directory constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. Industry and topical specialist directories which are free and paid.
Social Media
Social media improves search engine ranking and as well as customer relations. Twitter: used to build up a list of followers. You can also retweet articles written from by other publishers and opinion leaders in your sector to drive traffic to your website. Facebook:Develop fans and likes to post updates to and also drive traffic to your website. LinkedIn: Join groups within your target market to receive and publish news updates which drive referral traffic to your website.Social Bookmarking sites
Delicious links: Delicious is a popular social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering websites. Monitoring Delicious is a way to see what’s hot on your website.
Digg Entries: Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content. Monitoring Digg is a great way to see what’s popular on your website.
HubPages is the best place to publish articles (what we call “Hubs”) with useful, interesting information, and earn ongoing royalties from them Squid
Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster tool helps you to control your website for Google related things in many ways, you can control the crawl rate, fix a geographical location to target, submit your sitemap etc and so many. This is a free service by Google. Bing Webmaster tools can be used for Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search.