How to run search engine optimisation on a small budget
Tuesday, 13 October 2009 21:21
Everyone wants to be at the top of Google, but how do you achieve that? Effective search engine optimisation involves three elements. All require specialist knowledge and investment to achieve optimal results, but you can get a long way on your own by following a few basic principles.
Identify key phrases for optimisation
Just achieving a high search engine ranking is easy. Anyone could gain a top position for ‘purple venusian cucumbers’, because there’s no competition. But there’s a good reason for that: no-one is searching for it. Optimisation efforts need to be focused on terms that people actually search for.
To find out how many people are looking for a given key phrase you can use one of the tools provided by the main search engines, or an independent tool such as Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com). Enter all the relevant key phrases you can think of, and the tool will tell you how popular each one is, how many competing pages it returns, and suggest other phrases that are related. Target those phrases that attract more searches but return fewer competing pages.
Optimise your site
For each key phrase, identify the highest ranking or most relevant page of your site and optimise that one. To find out which page already ranks highest for a given key phrase, type ‘site:www.yoururl.com’ followed by the phrase into Google’s search box. Don’t try to optimise any page for more than two or three related phrases.
Make sure you include the phrase in all of these elements of the page:
- The <Title> tag
- At least one heading tag (<H1>, <H2> or <H3>)
- The text of the page, at least 3 or 4 times
- The image Alt tag (if there is a relevant image)
- The Description meta tag. This is the description of your site that Google normally displays in its listings. Using it will not help your rankings, but it will help your clickthrough rate
- If you are optimising for Bing, use the key phrase in the name of the page, eg ‘purple-venusian-cucumbers.html’.
Google ignores the Keywords meta tag. If you are optimising primarily for Google, you can safely do the same.
Build up your links
A page’s position on Google for any given search depends mainly on two factors: its relevance to the search and its page rank. Relevance is determined by a wide range of elements, of which the most important are listed above. Page rank is determined by the number and quality of links from other pages.
Attaining links is the main cornerstone of any effective optimisation programme. These are some of the many ways you can build up a network of links:
- Reciprocal linking with complementary non-competing sites
- Participation in online discussion forums
- Membership of affiliate programmes
- Use of social networking and bookmarking sites
- Submission to online press release distribution sites such as OpenPR and PressBox
Achieving high ranking without good page optimisation is difficult. Achieving it without good linking is virtually impossible. The site that does both well, wins.
Bruce Townsend is in-house online marketing expert for ecommerce software specialist, Actinic and co-author of ‘Selling Successfully Online’. Originally published on Home Business Network.