SEO Tips & Tools

When preparing your site for the internet/search engines you should follow these tips.

Let's first of all remember that your goal is sales, not simply traffic. All the traffic in the world won't help if your site design is poor or navigation system difficult to understand and use.

You would also want to ensure that the user can find your information/products with the minimum of fuss, and that you have given serious consideration to where you want to drive your traffic.

SEO Tip 1) Keywords or key phrases

Your first step is keywords & phrases. This is what searchers are typing into search engines that relates to your products or services. Start with a list of what you imagine people are typing in, and then confirm or deny your suspicions with these tools.

Bare in mind that single keywords are extremely sought after and attract very high competition. There will be hundreds of thousands of pages competing for single keywords. You will be far more effective targeting strings of multiple keywords referred to as key phrases.

It is also quite likely that people typing single keywords into search engines are “browsers”. People entering key phrases tend to be more genuine in their search - and are therefore more likely to be buyers - by virtue of the fact that they know what they want. For instance, if someone was to search for “car tyres” they are possibly just browsing, whereas if their search was “performance car tyres sydney” they are probably more likely to be looking to buy.

Overture (free)

Overture are a division of Yahoo Search Marketing. Their aim is to entice you to sign up for their pay-per-click service (more on this later). As a service they provide a tool that queries their search database and lets you know how many times your keyword or phrase has been searched for across their search engine and their search engine partners.

It also lists similar phrases and their search regularity. This is a very handy tool for initial research, although you can expect the results to be slightly exaggerated because it is a service they sell. However, as a comparison this would certainly be relevant.

Wordtracker ($)

Wordtracker is a paid service. It gets its results by monitoring meta engines (search engines that get their results by querying other search engines and compiling the results) such as ask.com and dogpile.com. Wordtracker is a great service that includes the ability to check competition for keywords and phrases.

This is very useful for searching out those niche phrases that others are not targeting. It also includes “keyword universe” tool for helping you discover keywords for your industry that you may not have thought of. As part of the service each month they email you the top 500 searched terms across their engines.

Possibly the most effective stand-alone keyword research tool currently available.

NicheBOT (free)

NicheBOT is one of the few free online tools to offer keyword suggestion & competition analysis. The best if you dont have the budget for wordtracker.

GoodKeywords (free)

Goodkeywords differs from the tools above in that it is a small downloadable program (500kb). Despite its size it is extremely useful. Bringing together much of what is offered in the above online tools in a tiny package. It allows you to save your keyword research which is not possible with the free tools above. A must have for the budget concious.

SEO Tip 2) Title Tags

• Your title tag will appear in the uppermost bar of your browser (in this case: SEO Tips & Tools - Improve search engine visibility).

• It will also appear as the title of the search results page of search engines.

• Your title is the most important area for SEO and must contain your keyword(s) or key phrase(s). Bare in mind that, as mentioned, this will be the title of your search engine results and must, for this reason, be readable and understandable. Filling a title tag with keywords and making it difficult to read is a common mistake.

You have to consider what will grab a searchers attention as they are scanning a search engine results page. They are unlikely to click on a result with a title that is nothing but keywords put together randomly. Creating a title that contains keywords, entices the searcher and remains readable is the key.

SEO Tip 3) Meta Description

The meta tag description is what will often show up in search engine result pages as the description for your page, under the "title" described above. I say often because it has been adopted as such & then dropped by search engines time & again. Google for example stopped using meta description & has now started using it again. Some search engines prefer to truncate the body of the page text & use that as the page description in their search results. Regardless, it is a worthy inclusion.

We cannot control what the search engines may do tomorrow, so we should serve them with all the data we can.

Having your keywords in the description can add prominence to it. Although this is no longer the case with Google, other search engines still give keywords in descriptions reasonable weight. What a meta descriptions real role is shouldn't be overlooked. It's purpose is to entice customers/searchers to your site. For this reason it should expand upon your "Page Title" & clearly describe the pages purpose or function as well as include calls to action. In other words, it should be a description and an advertisement in one!

Be sure to spend time & make it so. You would be surprised how many times I have seen more traffic going to a lower ranked site thanks to a carefully crafted title & description tag.

SEO Tip 4) Keyword Density & Prominence

Keyword density refers to the number of times your keyword is repeated compared to the number of words on your page & is expressed as a percentage. Keyword prominence takes into account your keyword use in headings, positioning of your keywords on the page and keyword use in links etc.

Preferably you should place your most important keywords in your headings & at, or near to, the start of a your web page. Ideal keyword density & prominence varies with each search engine. Generally a keyword density of 2-8 % is desirable. Prominence obviously should be as high as possible for your most important keyword, decreasing with keyword importance.

If you have pictures on the page, be sure to include your keywords in the alt tags used to describe them. Also use your keywords in link text. Using keywords in these positions will increase their prominence.

There are many tools availible on the internet to measure density & prominence, here are some of the most useful:

General SEO tips for writing copy for the internet

• Do use your keywords in Headings
• Do add style to your important keywords. Bold or italic.
• Do include your keywords in bullet style lists.
• Don't get too carried away with density. You must hold your readers attention. This is near impossible if your copy is saturated with keywords. If it doesn't sound natural, rewrite it!
• Remember there are two ways to effect density. More keyword repetition or less on-page text.
• Dont copy others. Bring your opinion to your website. This will encourage other sites to link to you as the information is truely unique.