Hey Guy’s,
Haven’t done an SEO a post in a while, and for those who are juts looking up seo, SEO is search engine optimisation, so I’m going to take you through just a handful of points on my SEO checklist, do these points, and read a few of my other articles and you cant go far wrong.
Wuup is a little over 5 months old, our traffic grows by 50% each month, so we can’t be doing everything wrong!
1. Keyword research and Keyword Volumes
Well with Wuup, we cover all sorts of topics, and as we were just targeting everyone computing, gaming, and coding related, I must admit I didn’t do a lot of this one, also mainly as this Wuup site is more of a love affair than a money making machine. Even though that is fact, I still did do some research just to check we would actually get some visitors!
Keyword research however is extremely important when it comes to planning a proper SEO campaign, i.e you have a site, a topic and you need targeted traffic – and the word I just used which is important is targeted.
Use tools like
- Yahoo Search Marketing – Overture
- The free keyword tool at keyword discovery
Sorry guy’s I’m not going to link to them for a freebie inbound link, but please go google them.
Search for your topic broadly to start. Example, you want to make a website about spoon’s, so do a search for ‘spoons’. Usually the highest volume of traffic is for that generic i.e ‘spoons’ (however this isn’t always the case), also people mistake this as the ultimate keyword to rank for, when it’s commonly 2 words or more which result in a sale, or lead, or whatever you are trying to achieve. What you want to do then, is perhaps look at lower level keywords, called ‘key phrases’ and in the spoon’s example, would probably be something like ‘metal spoons’, or ‘big spoons’, these are terms which are more likely to get you a sale than generics. Not to say you don’t aim in the general direction of the generic, just don’t get obssessed, it will most likely come with time, depending on your comeptitors – you’re going to need to get some age on your domain, but anyway, we’ll talk about that later.
So just to conclude, sort out the terms from research, list them in order of traffic and competition. Then you can initailly aim for less competitive keywords, getting targeted traffic fast!
2. Use Your Keyword Data to Pick a Domain Name
Assuming your going to be building an SEO site, for your campaign, your going to need a domain name. Times have changed a little, and down to experience, domain names aren’t as huge factors as they used to be. However I will make some clear suggestions here:
2.1 Brand or Keyword Rich Domain Names
When you reach this point, you need to make a consideration for if you have a sole aim for SEO, and fast progress, or a brand related domain to reflect your company, or you clients company.
Using my spoon exmaple, here is some examples:
- metalspoons.co.uk
- CuttingEdge.co.uk
Basically the first point is a seo domain, it contains the keywords of ‘metal’ and ‘spoons’, this may be because the 2 highest volume of relevant key phrase may be ‘metal spoons’.
The second example includes more of a brand name, i.e ‘Cutting Edge’, which could be a brand for making metal spoons. It doesn’t contain any keywords, however, it has a more ‘memorable name’, and if a brand is built on well, conversiosn can reflect that.
2.2 Domain Name Conclusion and Hifens in Domain Names
As I previously mentioned, domain names as an SEO factor isn’t as prominent as it used to be, and often the benefits can be nonexistent, or very minimal from experience, however, hifens ( – ) within domain names seem to be decreasing with effectivenss, and where possible I do tend to avoid their usage.
3. Create SEO Copy for your SEO Website
Right, so you’ve got some research going, now you need to either create the content yourself via doing research, and creating the content or have a professional copywriter do the copy for you. There are specialist SEO copywriters about, however they charge more and often aren’t worth the extra money.
If you choose to write the copy yourself, its going to take some time to do it properly, and I usually don’t advise this unless you don’t have the budget for a copywriter, or have a lot of time on your hands!
3.1 Optimize Your Copy
So you’ve got your copy, you then need to optimize it, but carefully, so that its in such a way that the search engines do not penalize you for keyword stuffing it. Keep it readable, but put in the keywords you want so they appear more frequently, aim for one in particular with a handful of supporting less frequent keywords. But remember, don’t over do it!
3.2 Picking a URL
So you’ve got your copy written, each page is aimed at particular keywords AND totally relevant to the user who might read it (cause if its not relevant or readable, they’ll leave – and never ever come back!).
Pick a URL like these examples:
- keyword.html
- key-phrase.html
- longer-key-phrase.html
- i.e metal-spoons.html
As you can see there, examples above, I have substituted spaces with hifens, unlike the domain names, this method is still effective. But you can clearly see the page names include useful keywords for the search engines to identify your page.
3.3 Controversy Over Rewriting URL’s, and page extensions
This topic is controversial for sure, some people say that you should not re-write URLs, (i.e if you have a database dynamic driven website), as google and other search engines know best, and will simply work it out for themselves.
Some people suggest using sitemaps to help google index your pages.
In my experience, yes you should rewrite the url to more readable urls, and stay away from complicated query strings, here is an example:
- www.site.com/page.php?page=23232&name=242ad23
Now thats not real, but it gives you and idea – and the reason why I say you should re-write a URL, is simply because Google advise you do in their guidelines, so I’m kinda inclined to go with their advise… I’m sure they know best – I’ve seen no negative effects yet…
As for page extensions, beyond a doubt for a long time .html extensions were king, now this is not so much the case, I still like them, and use as a first preference, but I wouldn’t hesitate to have page.php or another other equivilent, as long as the keywords were within.
This is all from personal experience – and hey, you found this article right???
3.3 Make use of H1 – H6 Tags when formatting your articles
The search engines use these, so they can priortise the data you have within your page, and pick out whats relevant to the searchers, and often, the searchers will be searching for something within these headings. In rank of importance, h1 text is considered most important, hence you want to get your keywords in here, but equally don’t make all your headings use the same h1 tags. Like this article, we use H1 for main headings, h2 for sub headings, and h3 for the sub headings within those. It makes for a readable article – so don’t try to fool the search engines, it won’t work! You also don’t HAVE to use all h1 h6 within the articles, just use what’s necessary and relevant.
This article is now getting to long, most of you will be asleep already, I will have to post an additional part to this soon, please return, and I’ll link to it from here. There is so much more I want to say!!
I will leave you with this
SEO = Relevancy + Keywords + Quality
Build websites for your users first, search engines second. No good getting users to websites they will in return leave.
Thanks
Alan Hamlyn
