We have outlined some tips on how to get started on your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign.
1. Research potential keywords for your business
The main purpose of an organic SEO campaign is to get relevant and targeted traffic to your website with the right keywords. You should already have an idea of what keywords you want to target. There are tools available on the Internet like Google Adwords keyword tool which will help you with some keyword ideas. Use it at your own discretion, but remember that it is you that knows your business and the industry best.
2. Target long tail keywords
Having short and generic keywords for your webpages can be too broad and not targeted enough. For example, a user would not simply type in ‘travel agent australia’ or ‘holiday apartments’. It is not specific enough and would return with millions of results. It is best to target specific keywords relevant to your business and products and services. It’s also recommended that you include a geographic region to your keyword as well, for example ‘group travel specialist campbelltown’ or ‘holiday apartments Mooloolaba sunshine coast’. You should also look at less competitive keywords that suit your business goals. You may rank quicker with the less competitive keywords and work long-term on the more competitive keywords.
3. Relevant content
You should always provide relevant content for your website in order to increase your keyword density. Updating your content regularly with new content is also a part of any good long term SEO strategy and keeps the ‘spiders’ coming back to your website. It also helps your website to receive high quality inbound links.
4. Unique titles for every page on your website
Include relevant and unique page titles for each webpage that relates to the content of that page.
5. Unique description for each webpage
Describe your webpage content in a couple of sentences. Like the title, your descriptions appear on the search engine results pages and it should be relevant and unique to that page. Try to make the description as compelling as possible.
6. Keep the important content near the top
Content is king in SEO! Content at the top of the page is deemed more important than in the 4th paragraph.
7. Validate HTML and CSS code of your website
Make sure that you follow a valid semantics for HTML and CSS coding. Ensure that your keywords appear in your heading tags (H1, H2, H3 etc), image alt attributes, lists and layout code with DIVs.
8. Use search engine friendly URLs
URLs are one of the major elements to pull relevant content for search engines. Thus, it is recommended that you use search engine friendly URLs (also known as SEF URLs). Avoid using dynamically generated URLs. For example, the CMS Joomla supports SEF URLs.
9. Create a sitemap for your website
A sitemap is a separate webpage that contains links to all your webpages that you want indexed by a search engine crawler. The sitemap also helps your visitors to locate specific webpages.
10. Online directories
Having entries in relevant and popular online directories can help enhance your search engine rankings. However, please note that there are thousands of online directories and not all of them carry a lot of weight with search engines. .
