Five more top Search Engine Optimisation tips for your business website
Whether you’re just starting to optimise your website for search engines, or need to make changes to your current Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to improve your results, concentrating on the top SEO tips outlined in this article will help you enhance the visibility of your web page in search engine results or query pages.
On this page:
- Find the right keywords
- Build links
- Avoid broken links
- Update with fresh, original content
- Use an XML sitemap
Find the right keywords
The use of carefully chosen keywords or phrases is key to SEO success. Your keywords form the backbone of your SEO campaign and are the main tool used to encourage people to access your website.
A large number of businesses target the wrong keywords and lose website traffic and sales as a result. Even businesses that rank in the top 10 search engine results lose out if they’ve targeted the wrong keywords. For example, there’s little point ranking in the top 10 results for “printers in New Zealand” when you sell printer cartridges and refills. People looking for printers, not cartridges, will visit your site, which means you’re spending time and money attracting the wrong people to your website.
Draw up a list of keywords or phrases that people are likely to type into a search engine when looking for a business like yours. Bear the following in mind:
- Your website’s target market.
- Geographic or demographic considerations.
- Age and gender of your target market.
Use tools such as Keyword Discovery or Google’s Adword suggestion tool to help you research keywords and phrases. This will tell you how popular these keywords or phrases are as search terms. You should end up with a list of more than 100 words and phrases before you start to pare these down and refine your list to niche key phrases that will attract the right visitors to your web pages. Phrases such as “printer refills in Auckland”, “ink cartridges”, or “cheap ink refills” would be more appropriate for the example of the printer cartridge business above.
You should aim to focus on niche keywords or phrases to attract visitors who are looking for the information or products you sell. Allocate two or three keywords or phrases to each web page and optimise the content to enable you to drive targeted traffic to each page.
Build links
If you have a number of reputable websites that link back to your website (as a reference for further relevant information and content), this is believed to increase the relevancy of your site and your position on the search engine results page.
With link building, remember:
- Quality is better than quantity. You’d prefer a few goods sites to link back to your website than a whole lot of websites of dubious ranking, as this can negatively affect your SEO results.
- Ask people to link back to your site using text links that include your keywords or phrases. This should increase the relevancy weight search engines will apply to your site.
Use tools like Link Harvester, Link Diagnosis (for Firefox users), Analyze Backlinks or LinkPopularity.com to monitor your site’s link popularity.
Avoid broken links
Broken links that take a user to a 404 error page can negatively affect your search engine ranking. It suggests that your website is not well maintained and undermines trust you’ve built up with search engines. It’s best to avoid broken links where possible.
If you don’t have many links on your website, you can check them manually. If you have a number of links, use Google’s Webmaster tools, which includes Google’s view of your site and specific problems encountered on it, or download Xenu’s Link Sleuth to find broken links on your website.
Update with fresh, original content
Updating your website regularly with fresh and original search engine optimised content is likely to increase your position in search engine results pages. Adding a blog section to your website that is updated a couple of times a week, with relevant and topical information, can be an effective way to do this if you’re not adding new or updated web content on a regular basis.
Submit an XML Sitemap
An XML Sitemap is a representation of the architecture of your website that you submit to search engines like Google, enabling them to gather information about your website. This is particularly useful for new sites without many links, sites with dynamic content or Flash that can be hard or impossible for search engines to index, and sites that can only be accessed by users.
Some experts argue that it is better to use other SEO techniques to encourage search engines to index and rank your pages rather than force them to read your content via a sitemap. While this is a valid argument, most SEO experts swear by Sitemaps – and they can help to overcome SEO challenges in the short term while you put other SEO plans in place.
