Get Me In Google's Internet Marketing Blog

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Business Owners

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is often still seen as a mystic art, particularly by those who most often buy it - business owners. In this article I'm going to de-mystify what search engine optimisation is and how to do it from a business owners' point of view.

Search engine optimisation is the process of making a web page about a single keyword and making it clearly understandable by the search engines. The starting point is to choose a keyword i.e. a word you would like to rank for in Google and the other search engines. Its important at this stage to be realistic - it's no good picking a massively competitive keyword and expect to be able to rank for it. Start off by picking a nice keyword - one that has some traffic, but is not that hotly contested. you can often manufacture these keywords by localising your keyword. For example, if you sell 'widgets' and the keyword 'widgets' is massively competitive, try 'widgets kent' , 'widgets sussex' or 'widgets wherever' it is likely you will cut your competition to a point where you can effectively compete.

Once you have chosen your keyword you need to create a new page around it, or, you need to optimise an existing page for it. Many different criteria are assessed by search engines to decide what keywords a web page is relevant for, and where to rank it, but the following elements of your web page should contain your chosen keyword:

• Page Title - the text you see in the top bar of the browser.
• Meta Keywords - part of the HTML code that most CMSs (Content management system) will allow you to easily edit.
• Meta description - also part of the HTML code, but this text must relate only to the page it is on - do not enter a generic site-wide description.
• Header (H1) - the main title on the page, otherwise known as the H1 tag
• Body text - include your keyword as close to the start of your page as possible, and repeat it as often as possible without jeopardizing the readability of the text.
• Images - add at least one image and add the 'ALT' text, which is the text that is displayed if you roll over an image on a web page in Internet Explorer. Google can be considered blind where images are concerned, and it uses ALT tags to 'see' the image.

So, now you have created a highly optimised page, and published it on your website with a link to it from your main menu, so Google can find it when it next visits your website - you can also add the page to your sitemap to help Google on its way. When Google looks at your page and finds your keyword in each of these critical areas it can't fail to know what keyword it is optimised for. However, that only about 30% of the battle to get ranked...

By far the most important element of search engine optimisation is to have lots of authoritative links pointing to your newly optimised web page. Google sees links as votes, and the more votes your web page has, the better it will rank. But just any ol' links will not do: you need good quality links with your keywords in your anchor text - and that can be pretty difficult to get. So, to explain a little more: you , no doubt, will have seen link that say 'click here' - 'click here' in this example is the anchor text, and this is one of the major criteria Google uses to determine what the page is about. Imagine how much more powerful that link would be if the anchor text said 'Widgets'.

Good quality links with keywords in the anchor text, linking to optimised pages are how to do search engine optimisation - to do it well is not easy.