April 30th, 2010 by Nick

Whether the aim of your site is to sell a product, or simply inform and enlighten, you will want a working internet marketing plan. A large part of this is ensuring your site scores highly on searches – i.e. appears on page one or two of the search engine rankings. Many people invest in expensive SEO tools and software, and attempt to do the job themselves. However, a better idea is to invest in the services of a good search engine optimization company – who will have all the tools you need.

When a company is asked to improve site rankings, it will look closely at the internal architecture of the site, in particular at the site mapping hierarchy – if one exists. They will then look at the page URLs and ensure they are visible to the search engines. This means using clearly defined keywords in the file name, that reflect those most likely to be used in searches. For example, if you were a sportswear supplier who sells tennis shoes, the relevant title may look like this: YourDomainName.co.uk/womens-tennis-shoes.html.

You will notice we have used hyphens rather than underscored spaces. This is because hyphens are recognised as spaces, whereas underscores are not. This makes the pages more visible to the search engines. Be careful, though, not to use too many hyphens or it can look spammy. In addition, you must remember that you have a finite number of characters to fit your title into, meaning 3 hyphens should be the max.

Your site will benefit enormously from a blog. While many search engine optimisation services will happily install one, few offer a copywriting service to complement it. You can get articles expertly written, but the writers need to know what keywords to insert, and in what density. One of the best SEO tools you can invest in is WordTracker. Others include Keyword Discovery and the Google AdWords tool. Although free versions of these are available, it’s more beneficial to purchase the full product, when running a business.

One area of SEO that leaves site owners bemused is where to put primary keywords so pages score highly in rankings. The most important thing to remember is that every page should have a title, unique and relevant to that page, which includes the primary key phrase (normally a recurring term of 2 to 3 words). Titles are an extremely important part of search engine optimisation; if primary key phrases aren’t included, it’s unlikely the pages will do well in searches.

Many SEO services include meta descriptions on client pages. A meta description is a descriptive tag that is hidden on the HTML, but becomes visible below site listings on searches. Although it won’t affect page rankings, it’s a useful tool as it can be used to attract people into clicking on that page. Content should be short, descriptive and relevant, and include relevant keywords. A meta description is a good way of inserting extra keywords not used in the page text, but beware it doesn’t make your online reputation management plan look spammy.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.