This SEO tutorial is by no means a definitive guide to Search Engine Optimisation. It is a brief summary of the main techniques used in Search Engine Optimisation, which will provide you with enough knowledge to perform basic search engine optimisation.
Phase 1: Keyword Selection
Keywords are the words and phrases that people type into search engines. For example, if you type "SEO PPC" into Google, this is a keyword (also known as a search phrase or query).
To get traffic from search engines, you need to know what people are searching for, and how much competition there is. This is easy but the difficult part is finding a balance between popularity and competition.
A keyword like “car rentals” is extremely popular as there are thousands of sites on the Internet that deal in some way with car rentals. The likelihood of you getting your site into the top ten search results for this keyword would be extremely small. Instead, a more specific keyword like “car rentals Cape Town” would have far less competition and the likelihood of ranking high for it would be far greater.
Begin by setting up a list of relevant keywords. Ask your friends what keywords they would enter into a search engine when looking for a service or product like yours. Then try to find as many synonyms and spelling variations for those keywords e.g. (holiday – vacation) and (optimization – optimisation).
Then use a keyword popularity tool to see how much traffic you can expect from your keywords. The Good Keywords Tool is particularly useful. It provides the number of searches on Overture for a particular keyword as well as variations of that keyword.
Select one keyword as your most important keyword. If possible, use this keyword as your domain name e.g. www.capetowncarrentals.com. Then optimise your home page for that keyword. Optimise the other pages on your site for the remaining keywords.
Phase 2: Optimisation
"Optimisation" simply means putting the keywords you have selected onto your web pages in the right places with the right formatting. This involves HTML which is the formatting language used to create web pages. It is by far the easiest part of SEO, but due to most people’s lack of knowledge of HTML, creates the impression of difficulty. In a nutshell in involves placing your keywords in the following places:
1. Your page's <TITLE>
2. Your "keywords" and "description" META tags
3. In a heading tag (H1, H2, or H3) near the top of the page
4. In the first paragraph of body text, and repeated 1-2 more times on the page
5. In the text of links that point to the page
Also, make sure that you use ALT tags for images. Search engines cannot “read” images; therefore supplying ALT tags gives the search engine text that describes the picture.
Once done, your site should be optimised enough to do well in the search engine rankings. There are many more techniques, but the optimisation techniques just described
should suffice for most sites.
Phase 3: Link Building
"Link building" means getting other websites to link to yours. Link building is important because search engines look at these links as a "vote" for your website, and they will boost your rankings accordingly. Link building is definitely the hardest part of SEO because of the time, effort and sometimes money involved.
For a new site, building links is vital for getting the site indexed on the search engines. Begin by submitting the site to directories like www.dmoz.org and www.yahoo.com. Once this is done, search engines will be able to “find” the site and add it to its index.
Building links should continue and can be done in the following ways:
- By trading links with other sites. Google has a system called Page Rank which assigns a number between 0 and 10 (10 being the best) to web pages to indicate the importance of the pages. The higher the Page Rank of pages linking to your page, the more Google regards that page as being important. If you install the Google Toolbar on your browser, you can view any page’s Page Rank.
- By submitting your site to the major directories. Don’t fall for scams offered by SEO companies claiming that they will submit your site to hundreds of different directories. There are probably only a handful of directories that are given any considerable consideration by search engines.
- By buying advertising (this would count as a link) on popular websites.
Links from sites with similar content to your own are given more credence by search engines. Therefore, concentrate your link building efforts around sites with similar topics to your own. Link building should continue indefinitely.
Following these three crucial phases will ensure that your site ranks high in the search engines thus generating significant traffic for your website which will hopefully convert into sales.
