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** This post was written by Kirsty Henderson. Read more about Kirsty below. **
Here are the rest of the posts in this series about building niche websites which make you money:
Part 1: Should you build a blog or static html website?
Part 2: Deciding On A Topic for Your Niche Website
Part 3: Getting Your Website Online (Part 1)
Part 4: Getting Your Website Online (Part 2)
Part 5: Getting Traffic To Your Website
Part 6: Optimising Your Website For The Search Engines
Part 7: Monetising Your Website (Part 1)
Part 8: Monetizing Your Website (Part 2)
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) gets a lot of attention in the world of web development – and with good reason.
Optimizing your site for the search engines, mainly Google, is massively important for bringing in visitors. Nobody really knows for sure what makes Google happy but lots of people have a lot to say on the subject and there are numerous companies who claim to be able to get you to the top of Google with their expert SEO techniques.
I admit that I don’t know exactly what gets a site to the top of the Google search results but I have some hunches and have had some success getting my sites to number one in the Google rankings for my targeted search terms.
A tactic called link-building (generating inbound links to your website) is a huge part of SEO but another large part is the on-site tweaks you can make to your website to fully maximise your chances of getting your website to the top of Google…here are some of those tweaks:
Content
As you get more and more involved in the web development and niche website field, there is one thing you will hear over and over again: “content is king.” Having great content is what will keep people reading, but having content that is well optimized for the search engines is what will allow readers to find you in the first place.
Approach each page of your website as if it’s its own piece of a larger puzzle. Each page should target some main keywords – identify these early on for each page and write your content accordingly.
This doesn’t mean cramming keywords into your content in spammy , keyword-stuffed sentences but it does mean writing with your keywords in mind and always trying to find ways to include them while still retaining the integrity of the content for the reader.
More About Keywords
Keywords are what people use when they perform a search and when they do this, it’s those keywords that the search engines will be finding on your website. Cramming a crazy number of keywords into your content is one way to do this but you want your site to make sense and not to look spammy so you shouldn’t go overboard with this strategy.
Fortunately, there are also other places besides your main content to put keywords. I change my target keywords for each page, based on the content of each page. I then make sure each of these items is named to reflect the keywords I’ve chosen.
Here are a few places, other than in your man content, where you can include your keywords:
- Title – The title of your page is what shows up in the search engines as the link to you page. Getting the title tag right is important. I make sure each title tag across my entire site is different, reflecting the content of each page. I generally only put the site’s name on the main page and leave it off on the rest of the pages, instead focusing on giving each individual page a title that describes the content well and is packed with the target keywords for that page.
- Description tag – This also shows up in the search engines just under your title tag. If you don’t have a description tag then a brief blurb of your page’s content will show up, so giving a short description of what the page is about including keywords is a good way to entice people to visit your site and might also help you with your rankings.
- Meta tags – Whether these things do anything or not is up for debate but I find that filling my meta tags with the keywords I’m targeting for each page makes keeping track of everything easier.
- URL – I try to name each individual page using as many keywords as possible that I’m targeting. So if I am writing a page about ski holidays in Whistler and targeting those keywords, I will name that page ‘ski-holidays-in-whistler.htm’ rather than just ‘whistler.htm’.
- Images – Images allow you a few ways to get your keywords into your code. You can name your images after your keywords such as ’ski-holidays-in-whistler1.jpg’, ’ski-holidays-in-whistler2.jpg’ etc. You also have the option to put ALT and TITLE tags and these should always be filled with either your keywords or a short phrase with your keywords in mind.
- Links – When linking to your other pages within the site, try to use your keywords as the anchor text rather than a generic ‘click here’.
Coding
Keeping the code for your website as simple as possible will give the search engines more content to focus on and less bloated code to crawl through. The more code you have, the more they will have to sift through to get to the good stuff.
If you are building an HTML site, make sure you use CSS (cascading style sheets) as much as possible both for the layout of your site and the appearance of the fonts ad images.
Before I learned CSS, I would have individual FONT tags for each title and paragraph which adds a lot of extra text to my file. I would also arrange my site by using TABLE tags which can get very bulky and confusing very quickly. Now, after some reading and lots of trial and error, I am able to do everything I could do before using CSS which has hugely reduced the amount of code on each page giving Google and the gang more content to read and less of the stuff that holds it together – which does nothing for your SEO.
Site Setup
I spend a lot of time focusing on navigation and the behind-the-scenes sort of stuff – like how to organise my site into folders.
This is only a hunch I have, but I think pages located closer to the main folder do better in the search engines. So rather than burying my content in numerous folders like http://www.example.com/topic/subtopic/subsubtopic/title.htm I would recommend using http://www.example.com/subsubtopic/title.htm.
When a site has a lot of pages this strategy might become unruly but I try to limit the levels of my sites as much as possible.
Summary
The world of SEO is a huge and complicated one and although many people claim to be experts, nobody really knows what Google and the other search engines have up their sleeves. With so many things out of your control in the world of SEO, it makes sense to get the things you do have control over, as good as you can get them.
Optimising your own site as much as possible for the search engines is a big step you can take to beat the competition, all other things remaining equal. It doesn’t make any sense to focus huge amounts of time on off-site SEO if you don’t have it right on your own site first.
Kirsty,
Thank you for the post! As someone who is currently starting out with a new blog the concept of SEO can definitely be overwhelming, so having some basic pointers is definitely beneficial.
Sean
I’ll just add a few of my own thoughts as I’m lucky to have some experience in this area. There’s some solid tips already though!
“This is only a hunch I have, but I think pages located closer to the main folder do better in the search engines.”
This is true, more or less. Keep the number of subcategories down in order to keep the URL short. Google seems to prefer shorter URLs, so iron out all the irrelevant junk. If I were you I would change the way the blog generates titles – getting rid of the /2009/05/20. /blog/yourposthere is sufficient and your visitors won’t know the difference.
Make sure you have your blog configured so in the title of the website, the title of the blogpost comes first, and then the name of the blog. I’d recommend leaving the slogan out because in SEO land, the title has an overall value and the addition of words diluted the power of each one. (ie. Less=More). But that’s a personal choice and the argument goes both ways.
With images the ALT tag is very important… but only if you want people to come to your site from images.google.com. You’ll have to be prepared for people to copy your image source HTML and use your image on their site, at your hosting expense.
The Description Tag is important for actually getting people to click on to your site once it’s on the search results. See if you can start your description tag with “How to” – it will help you focus the Tag on the needs of the visitor.
Title does matter, you need to do your best with it to make the title is something someone would search for in a search engine.
For example, training dogs. Most people’s title would be
“How To Train Your Dog”(search volume in Google 12,100 per month)
But a better title would be:
“How To Train A Dog” (search volume 27,100).
Incredibly using the Google keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) it turns out “How To Train Dog” gets 49,500 searches. I wouldn’t advocate butchering grammar just for Google, but an easy rule to follow is to not use personal pronouns (you, my, your, etc).
Put your prospective page or blog title into that tool and Google will come up with a list of similar search terms and how many people are searching them.
For Wordpress owners I believe these three things are the most important:
- Making the title something someone would search for
- Making sure the URL corresponds with the title
- Getting links with rich anchor text.
Hope that helps the readership.
Matt.
Hi Kirsty… thanks for a consolidated, and easily digestable post on the mine field of SEO!!!