A fear shared by every new online business owner is that, after all the time, effort and money they pour into an online presence, it will fail to generate traffic.
The following is an eight step search engine checklist to carry out when creating a new business site – or when reviewing an existing one – to prevent it lapsing into an e-commerce non-event.
1. Keyword research
All good marketing relies on a familiarity with the target audience. As a business owner, you should know what words and terms your customers will use to find you online.
“We do that by designing an avatar for a target market, down to specifics of age and demographic,” says David Jenyns, director of Melbourne SEO Services. “Once you understand their problems you can ascertain what they would be typing into Google to solve them. Make sure you get the keywords that match what it is they’re looking for.”
You may find that the ideal keywords are very competitive. Jenyns recommends targeting less competitive terms as well, as this will let new businesses circumvent the competition, and build some easy, relevant traffic early on in the life of the site.
2. Buy a keyword rich domain name
Not only do search results favour a domain that contains a desirable keyword, but people searching for that keyword are also more likely to click on it.
“Whatever your primary keyword is, if you can get that into your domain name, it just seems to rank a lot better,” says Jenyns. “The actual branding of having that keyword in there, if it’s something that your clients are looking for, it will also increase your clickthrough rate.”
3. Correct URL structures
In much the same way as a keyword-rich domain can improve search results, so can having static, logical domain names. It’s important to get this right at the outset, as you shouldn’t change a URL once it has started getting backlinks, as these are vital for search indexing.
“A good URL might be something like: www.yourdomain.com/category/productname.html,” says Justin Bruce, director of marketing at Blue Frog Marketing. “A bad one might be: www.yourdomain.com/productid=?1438. That’s a dynamically generated URL, whereas the former one was a static page. Google favours static pages.”
4. Keyword specific pages
It’s important that each of your key products has its own page. Each product will have associated keywords to target, but simply listing these on the homepage is not the most effective way of improving search results for those terms.
“Rather than a classic page that says ‘we’re a florist, we do all sorts of tropical flowers’, you want to say ‘we’re a florist and we specialise in bird of paradise flowers’, and link that to a separate bird of paradise page,” suggests Bruce. “That helps Google believe that you’re a specialist in that field, and will rank you higher if someone searches for that product in their area.”
5. Placing keywords
Once you’ve established what your target keywords and phrases are, you need to place them in the correct spots throughout the site, both in the copy that displays on each page, and within the html meta-data behind the scenes. This is relatively simple to do, especially if your site is using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress.
“Meta-data is a combination of keywords and key phrases that you want to get known for, but also relevant to what people are actually searching for,” explains Bruce.
There are three types of metadata that are currently most crucial for SEO: title tags, H1 tags, and meta-descriptions, all of which can be found and edited within your CMS, by looking at the source code of each page.
Title tags appear at the very top of the browser window, and should be no longer than 60 characters, or approximately three to five words, as this is all a search engine will read. They are denoted in the source code of a page like this:
< t 1 > Here’s the keyword rich title of the page < / t 1 >
Header tags, or H1 tags, are the bold text that acts as a headline in the copy of a page. They appear as follows in the source code:
< h 1 > A headline containing relevant keywords < / h1 >
The meta-description of a page is a paragraph that describes the page to the search engine. It should be approximately two to three sentences in length, or 160 characters. It appears in the source code like this:
< metaname=”description” content=”A keyword-rich paragraph that describes the page” / >
Once your keywords have been liberally applied to these meta-data, use them two to three times on each page where relevant, remembering that readability is more important than search-engine friendliness.
“Usability always comes first,” says Melbourne SEO’s Jenyns. “A search-engine spider isn’t going to pull out their wallet and make a purchase.”
6. Keep key phrases brief
Any information that is meant to act as a signifier to a search engine needs to have a singular, simple, clear message. Bluefrog Marketing’s Bruce uses the example of a gym promoting their spin classes online.
“When you land on the ‘spin class’ page, it needs to say ‘spin class’,” he explains. “You can add more to it, but the more you add, the more it dilutes the message. You shouldn’t put a list in the H1 headings that says ‘pump, boxing, spin, personal training’. If you want to do that, you need new pages.”
7. Internal links
Search engines like to see lots of relevant internal links within a site.
“On your homepage, don’t put everything you do,” says Bluefrog’s Bruce. “Keep all the pages simple, put a paragraph or two with the top keywords, and link from your homepage to an internal page. Those links should include the keyword or phrase. Google likes that approach, especially if people click on the links.”
8. XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is basically a text document that outlines exactly where all the pages on your site are, and how users navigate to them. It shows all of the separate pages and how they’re linked, and helps search engines to index the site.
Many CMSs (WordPress for instance) have plugins that can generate sitemaps for you and submit them to Google. Alternatively, you can have one generated at XML-sitemaps.com and submit it to directly to Google.
Learn what needs to be done to improve your SEO with a free analysis from Netregistry’s The Optimiser.
Image credit: Thinkstock
Some good points Luke.
1. Your avatar concept is something I’ve recently heard about and am practising under the name of personas. I think it’s a great way to get the client to think about what’s important: what the client needs.
2. exact match domains still work. Google keeps saying they will solve the problem so the keyword rich domain name may not be as effective in the future. I often toss up the options with my client. A branded domain name is more of a long term brand promotion strategy, while a keyword targeting domain name will work better in the short term. Often doing both is the answer!
3. You have a typeo in your dynamic URL example (? in wrong place). The latest practices tend to drop file extensions like .html. They are not needed any-more. the terminology here is always mixed up. Dynamic pages means they are code based and often use databases. This is separate to the URL that is used to get to the page. It’s true that a ? often indicates that the page will be dynamically generated, but with modern systems and URL rewriting many dynamic websites present themselves with static looking URLs. Google does not favour “static” pages per-say, but it does find static looking URLs easier to crawl.
5. H1 is not really “meta”. It’s visible and meta is about additional information outside the visible page. The proper term here is semantic mark-up. H1 provides a semantic meaning that the text is the main heading for the page, therefore Google with consider it as more important.
You got the title tag right. I often see people calling it the title meta tag. Even though it is meta data (as you state) it is not part of the html meta tags syntax. Maybe it should have been.
Your code for the , and tags are incorrectly formatted. Try placing code in
or tags so you can correctly show them in articles. Or look into html encoding the mark-up characters.Outside the title tag, words in meta tags have no influence over Googles algorithms. So focus on readers and not Google.
Hope that helps
Tiggerito