Shoe String SEO

There are many factors to consider when reviewing a site for SEO. On-site, off-site, target market, useability to name but a few. Today i will be talking about on-site factors.

On-Site SEO

This kind of budget seo is often overlooked recently in favour of massive/bulk link building campaigns.

No matter how much off-site seo you do (link building, cost-per-click advertising, banner adverts etc) if your site isn't readable by search engines and people then it's just not going to work.

So what can i do?

First: You should make some catchy (but relevant) phrases and put them in a fairly central location on your website in a bulleted list. Take a look at Debt Help Quick (one of our recent clients) and you will see a great example of this. This grabs the attention of the visitor and immediately, at-a-glance, tells them what your site is about and what it does. In budget seo terms the search engine spider will easily be able to see what kind of internal category it should put your site in and what is relevant to it.

Great, ok what else?

Header tages (h1-h5) and bold tags in the html to emphasize important words in your content doesn't just make them stand out to your users, it also tells the search engines that these are important phrases and really say what your site is about. Remember: A search engine isn't as intelligent as a human (yet!) so it still has to follow some rules to work out what your site is supposed to be about and what it isn't

Feel free to include some nice flashy images or in fact flash animations but you must remember to include 'alt' tag text that tells the search engine what this image is supposed to be.

That's enough to get you started.. more to follow soon.

What are Metatags?

Ok first off i should explain what metatags even are if you haven't heard the term before.

Metatags are information about the web page you're looking at. If you 'view source' on a web page sometimes you will see a section at the top withing the HEAD tags that has a tag called META in it. This will then have a name attribute which will usually be keywords, description or title. This is then followed by another attribule called content.

All this stuff is designed for non-humans to be able to tell what the page is about and was originally what search engines used to determine the topic and content of your page. Unfortunately these tags (especially meta name='keywords') was abused so spammers would fill this information with completely irrelevant data just to get them to show up in search engines for anything.

So i shouldn't use them then?

Since then most search engines have stopped placing much weight (in terms of how they effect a page's ranking) on metatags. But that doesn't mean they're completely useless.

Google still uses the title tag and often takes exerts from the description tag. MSN (Bing) and Yahoo still use the data to an extent too.

So you're saying i should use them then

The simplest answer is: Yes you should but keep them relevant. You don't actually NEED to have the keywords metatag at all and it certainly won't hurt your low cost seo campaign. As with any seo the rule is: Keep it relevant and don't be tempted to spam. Make your title tags relevant and you meta name='title' as explained in my last article. You're only risking ranking penalties by making irrelevant or spammy metatag.

Also try and keep them unique per page. Each page should be about something different to reflect that in the metatags and title

Ok thats all for now

What is a keyword?

Keywords are what customers search for in search engines to (ideally) find your site in the budget seo. Keywords are usually one to four words in length.

Why are keywords important

Choosing the right keywords isn't just important to getting relevant traffic and sales from your site its EVERYTHING. If you don't appear at a reasonable position for a relevant search phrase you will get very little worthwhile traffic.

This article will teach you basic keyword research strategies and introduce you to more advanced local tactics.

How do i choose my keywords?

Think about what you site is about and what YOU would search for if you wanted to find it. For example: If you're selling sports equipment then its probably not such a great idea to go for 'sports equipment' because it's too generic and people wouldn't generally search for it to find a tennis racket or a set of golf clubs. You need to be as specific as possible to get relevant traffic without being so specific that you choose a keyword that very few people search for.

This is where keyword tools come in handy. These tool will show you an estimate of how much traffic a term receieves for a given term in a month. They will show you various variations of the keyword you enter. Put in something generic and it will show you many variations.

Free Keyword Research Tools

Google Keyword Tool - Search for keywords in over 50 languages. It features a very high quality, clean and frequently updated keyword database, with estimated search volume. This is my personal favourite and the i personally would alway use.

You could also try Wordtracker or Yahoo Search Marketing's keyword tool.

In summary: Make sure to spend a bit of time researching before you go ahead with a seo compaign. Speak to us if you need help choosing your keywords and we will happily take a look at your site and make some suggestiongs