Search Engine Optimization Tips for Newbies
For those who have only just come to the realization that there are things you can do to manipulate the ranking your website achieves on Google, learning about SEO seems like a bachelor’s degree-type commitment. SEO gets more complex by the day, and increasingly, search engine optimization tips have to target specific users. General advice just won’t do. What are the main things that those new to the strategy need to know?
Research your keywords using Google AdWords keyword tool
Diatribes about on-site and off-site optimization all make one assumption – that you already know the keywords related to your business. Your keywords should be:
* Between five and thirty in number (although a larger focus may dilute your efforts)
* Include different tense and participle forms of each other (for example – ‘booking Hong Kong hotel’ as well as ‘book Hong Kong hotel’).
* Inclusive of your location. The only exception to this is when your business is purely Internet based.
* Keyphrases, rather than keywords. Contemporary wisdom says that long-tail keywords (phrases of three or four words each) will best define your niche and give you best results.
Choose these instinctively at first, thinking about what terms a customer would use to find you. Once you have a basis, type some of them into Google AdWords keyword tool for some options you may not have thought of.
Remember the 80-20 Rule
80% of your search engine optimization results will come from your on-site work (web content, tagging, use of titles, etc). 20% of your results will come from your off-site work (press releases, article marketing, blog commenting, directory submissions etc). This is true regardless of how much time and effort you put into each – it is simply the way Google weights various factors in their algorithm. So, it makes sense to put 80% of your effort into on-site optimization!
Write your meta descriptions for people, not search engines
Your meta description is what Google displays in results when one of your webpages comes up for a search. Writing these for search engines (i.e., creating nonsensical keyword stuffed sentences), instead of people, will get you a good ranking but a poor click through rate (CTR). In other words, people will see – but they won’t care.
Whole blogs, books and directories have been written about SEO. These search engine optimization tips are only a starting point – but will help you create a solid base to work from.
