Search Engine Optimisation
Website Marketing and Promotion

Website Search Engine Optimisation Tips

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

If the Website is infused with targeted Keyword Phrases, the Website has a good chance that it will appear in the search results when a potential customer searches on those Keywords. In order to improve chances, the Website should be optimised with Keyword Phrases that are descriptive, related to content, and which receive a significant amount of searches on the web.

Keywords should appear in the page title, links, link titles, image descriptions content and headings.

To start, it is essential to identify your niche marketplace. The phrases to use are those that have more searches and less competition. If you optimise for terms that are too broad, you will likely increase traffic but decrease the conversion rate of visits to results. Talk to friends or family and ask what phrases they would use to describe your product or service.

Search Engines or Customers?

There is a fine balance between Copy written for Search Engines and Copy written for Customers.

It is necessary to produce a structured and focused Website that satisfies both requirements. The ideal Keywords will be frequently used in searches and easy to read.

First and foremost, the Website must be rich in information and content. It will then naturally contain the ideal Keywords and hold the attention of the visitor.

Visitor Keyword Searches

The following analysis shows the Keywords that were used by visitors to find this site. Only the last 10 entries are listed.

The number of pages visited is an important metric. The more pages read, the more interested the visitors are in the content of the Website. The average time (Secs) spend viewing pages is also an indicator of interest in the Website. Note that the seconds spend viewing each page excludes the last page.

Keyword Tips:

• Use Keyword Phrases, not single words. There is too much competition for the single Keyword. As Website volumes increase, customers have been forced to become more skilled at searching – they are now searching more and more for specific strings. So select appropriate qualifiers to describe a Keyword. For example, "SEO" should become "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)".
• Concentrate on a maximum of two or three related Keywords for each page.
• To test the usage of a Word or a Phrase on the Web, use a Search Engine to see how many hits you get for each phrase. Use Australian spelling and idioms, if you want local visitors. The Macquarie Thesaurus can prove invaluable.
• Find the most common Keywords used with Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker. The Keywords shown relate mostly to USA usage.
• Examine each related word in the write up, and determine which variation is most likely to be used in a search. Avoid infrequently used synonyms of a Keyword. For example, try to eliminate infrequently used variations of the word "development" – develop, developing, develops, developed, developer. Include both singular and plural words.
• The words used in business may be different from the words that customers use. Use colloquial terms or the Website will not be found.
• The use of additional Web Pages will allow the Keyword Density to be improved, by concentrating on a narrow subject. So do not include every Keyword Phrase on every Web Page. Focus just on from 3 to 5 Keyword Phrases for each Web Page.
• It is best practice to use of H1 and H2 header tags to emphasize pertinent keywords and phrases. The H1, H2 and H3 headings tags are given high weighting by the Search Engines when close to the top of a Web Page. Include primary Keyword Phrases in the headings and insert extra headings to improve the readability.
• Some Search Engines extract details from the top row, some from the left column. Use the Search Engine listings to check that the Keywords have been placed in the best position.
• Use Keywords in the ALT Tag of Images and in the Title Tag of Links. This will improve the PageRank.
• Display Keywords in bold using <strong> rather than the <b> tag.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing occurs when the content of a Web page is excessively filled with Keywords and Keyword Phrases.

The first Search Engines ranked Websites according to the number of Keywords that were contained on a Web page. It did not take long before "Keyword stuffing" was used to obtain better Search Engine rankings. Nowadays the Search Engines can easily spot Web pages that employ this technique, and such Websites will be penalised.

Google and Synonyms

Google has changed how it treats synonyms (i.e. different words and not a variation of a word), as synonyms affect 70% of user searches. Google will now attempt to guess what the user is looking for and will display synonyms in bold. This will even apply to badly spelt words.

• Use variations rather than repeating the same phrase (Keyword stuffing)
• Use the spoken word and slang, avoiding technical terms. This could also make the copy friendlier and more acceptable to visitors.
• Focus on the most frequently used synonyms
• Turn off synonyms by putting a plug sign (+) before a word, or by putting a phrase in quotation marks.
• To find the synonyms of a word, place a tilde "~" in front of the word. Google will highlight all the synonyms of the word in the SERPs.