Putting SEO into Action - On Site and Off Site

Search Engines like Google will display your web site in the list of results if it thinks your web site is relevant to the search terms that have been entered, and the ranking (or order) it is displayed will depend on how popular or important it thinks your web site is.

Whether it’s relevant is determined mostly through on site factors like content and layout, whereas popularity and importance is largely measured by the number and quality of links to your web site.

The second phase of your SEO campaign will involve structuring the layout and content of your web site to target the keywords that have been indentified, making sure that search engines know about your web site and all its pages, and then developing links to your web site from other web pages.

To get displayed in search results a search engine needs to know about your web site and what it is about.

Indexing: is the web site actually listed? Search Engines use little computer programs called ‘spiders’ to crawl the internet and ‘index’ web sites (fancy name for check out your web site). You can let search engines spider know about your web site by submitting it’s (url) address to the list of web sites for the spider to visit. For Google and Bing this is easily done through their webmaster portals.

When the spider indexes your web site you want to make sure that it finds all the content on the web site. This can be achieved by adding a file called a sitemap which lists all the pages of the web site that you want the search engine spider which pages to visit.

Onsite SEO: Keyword focused content and structure

The keyword research report prepared by your SEO Professional will have identified the search terms (keywords) that potential customers would be using to find products and services related to your business.

The next step in the SEO process is to make sure that content and layout of your web site allows search engines to discover that these keywords that have been identified are indeed what you web site is about. This is done in several ways including:

• Using the main keywords in the menu structure
• Using keyword(s) in the file names and titles of individual pages
• Having page content containing the keyword(s)
• Internal linking using keyword(s) between pages that adds ‘relevance’ to each page

Once this has been done successfully, over the next few weeks you should start to see your web site appear in the search results relating to these keywords.

Off Site SEO: Building Links

The next phase of the Professional SEO campaign is developing links to your web site. (Off Site SEO) This will improve the position of your web site in search results and start driving click thrus to your web site.

There are many different ways to develop links, and there are undoubtedly good ways and bad ways too. But most professional SEO campaigns will conclude that getting ‘quality’ links is the most important. These might start with links from listings in relevant business directories and extend articles published on blogs, and more than likely an element of social media given the more recent importance given to links from sites like twitter, facebook and pinterest.

And this brings us to one of the most important and perhaps the most often underdone factors in a successful SEO campaigns. Tracking how it is performing. The good news is there are some free tools available online that can help with this. Google provides a fairly useful range of tools including:

• Google Adwords has a keyword analysis tool for finding your keywords and data on search volumes and competition;
• Google Analytics when installed on your web site tracks the origin of visitors and pathways through your web site, and
• Google Webmaster lets the Google spider know about your web site and provides you with search display, ranking and click thru data on your web site.