Did you know that what other websites say about you is just as important to search engines as the content on your own website? Search engines consider websites that lots of other websites are linking to to be better quality, and will therefore show them further up the page. You can easily find out who is linking to you by using the free and easy tool, Open Site Explorer.

By plugging your URL into Open Site Explorer you will be able to see a few stats about your links. The real valuable information is under "Inbound Links". Here you can see exactly what websites are linking to you. For bonus points try plugging in one of your competitors URLs and see who's linking to them. Chances are they have links from a directory or blog that you could also get a link from! There's nothing wrong with a little bit of sneaky online espionage!

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the way you structure your website and your content so that it can be found and indexed by search engines like Google. When you optimise your website for search engines, it makes your site visible to search engines and therefore to the users.

Why is SEO important?

Studies show that 95% of NZ adult Internet users research goods and services online before making a purchase. This means that even though people might see your offline advertising offline or a sign they are highly likely to jump online to search for the products or services.

It's also well known that most users only browse through the first page and if they don't find answers to their query, they will click through to the second page but very few go past the second page. So if your website is not listed in the first couple of pages, chances are no one can find you. Instead, the users will probably find your competitors. Therefore, being seen on the first page of the search results should be one of your priorities when promoting your website.

To get your website ranking highly on Google, it pays to understand how Google actually works.

> Read our article on how Google works

We are often asked this question not long after a new website has gone live. To answer this question we first of all need to explain how Google works…

Google employs some of the world’s greatest minds to continually develop the complex ranking process which ensures that the top results of a user's search are of the highest relevance and quality.

This is of course what makes Google the world’s most popular search engine.

Understanding how Google works

Google is constantly looking for new websites and updated content on the Internet using automated programs known as 'spiders' or 'robots'.

These robots use links between websites to travel around the internet and find new websites. If your website is not linked to the rest of the web, the robots will not be able to access it. And Google will not be able to find it.

When Google finds a new web page, it will analyse the content, known as 'crawling' the content. It will then transport the information back to the Google data centre, where Google stores it, known as 'caching'.

Once Google has a copy of your website in its index, it will send out the robots to check for new content on a continual basis. If the robots find new or updated content Google will add it to its index. The period between visits will vary from site to site, but the robots are intelligent and they will not waste their time visiting websites regularly if the content does not change regularly.

Relevancy

Once Google knows about your website, it then needs to calculate the 'relevancy' of each page to a user's search term. So when a user performs a search with Google, Google calculates the relevancy of search term to the web page. If the search term is not relevant, or the search term does not match the content of the web page, Google will not list the page in the results.

Google also uses geographic location to help match a website to a user's search query. Google will try to serve web pages that match the users geographic location.

Quality

Relevancy is just part of the equation. Remember there are likely to be hundreds, thousands or millions of other websites that are 'relevant' to a user's search query. And only a few spots on the front page of the search results. Therefore, the next thing Google does is calculate the 'quality'. This allows Google to position the web pages that are most relevant and of the highest quality at the top of the results page. This is of course what makes Google the world’s most popular search engine.

Calculating the relevancy and quality

Google uses a very complex 'formula' or 'algorithm' to calculate the relevancy and the quality of a web page to a user's search query.

This formula uses many factors to help calculate the relevancy and quality of a web page, including and not limited to:

• Keywords found in the content of the page
• The headings
• Links on the page
• Hidden Meta data found in the code of the page
• External links that link to the page

Google awards ranking for a page based on how often the keywords appear, how prominent they are on the page and the location of the keywords on the page.

Therefore, the more focused you are on a certain topic, the better you will rank, as Google will believe that you are an expert on the topic.

Let’s use an example

Let’s say you have a website focused on photography services in Wellington. Let's say a user performs a search using “photography wellington”. Google, at the time this article was written, lists 411,000 web pages that match this search term. That is 411,000 different websites that are relevant to this search term.

Google has a tough job to order this list to ensure the websites at the top are the most relevant and of the highest quality.

The top listings are websites of photographers based in Wellington. If we look further down the list we will see websites with less relevant content, for example photography equipment suppliers, etc..

Now we know how Google works...lets apply this knowledge to our website...

Does Google know about my website?

Now that we have a greater understanding for how the search engines work, we can turn our attention to finding our website on Google.

The quickest way to find out is to perform a 'site' search. You can do this by entering Site: [your website address] into Google as shown below:

If your website has been listed you will see a list of all the pages of your website that Google has stored in its cache.
Next you can find out which search terms your website is ranking for. The easiest way to do this is to check your Search keywords, traffic report. If you are a Zeald client, you will be able to find this report in the admin of your website under the "Reports" tab.

If other people have found their way to your website via these search terms, chances are your website is ranking well for them. Try a Google search using the search terms to see where your website is currently positioned.

What if my website is not listed?

If your website is not listed with Google, your search for the site will result in something like this:


This means that Google has not discovered your website yet, or has not completed the content crawling and storage process.

Tell Google about my new website

You need to ensure that Google knows about your website or connect your website to the rest of the internet so Google robots can find your website. You can do this by submitting your site to Google and/or generating inbound links to your website.

But I have already submitted a sitemap?

Once you have submitted your sitemap, there is usually a delay before which you can find your website on Google. This is because the robots still have to find their way to your website and complete the process, which can sometimes take up to 3 months. Unfortunately you can't rush Google but there are things you can do to speed up the process.

How do I speed up the process?

There are a few things that you can do to ensure that your website is found and the content crawled as soon as possible:

1. You need to ensure that you have submitted your website
2. Or that you have some inbound links to create a pathway for the robots to be able to access your website
3. To get your website instantly to the top of Google for targeted search terms, use Google’s advertising program, called Adwords.

How do I get my website to the top of the Google results for a keyword of my choice?

There are various techniques you can do to improve a web site's ranking in Google's organic search results for chosen or targeted keyword phrases. This process is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and is a large topic that requires another article.

>Stay tuned for our next article on how to optimise your website

Or... you can get your website to the top of Google for targeted search terms using Google’s advertising program, called Adwords. By setting up Google Adwords you can create a listing and choose search terms that will trigger your listing or advertisement. The good thing about Google Adwords is that you don’t pay unless someone actually clicks on your ad and visits your website.

You might pay as little as 5c per click, especially if it is your own business name, which will be less competitive.

>Learn more about Google Adwords

>Learn more about Search engine advertising

Adding video to your website can help attract visitors, add value, and also improve the site's persuasion.

Over the last few years, there have been huge improvements to the Internet speeds thanks to broadband, the readily available video formats and also the cell phone technology which allows users to take videos and also watch videos easily. This means that we are able to produce videos and consume videos easily compared to say a few years ago. And studies are showing that people consume a LOT of video online. According to ComScore, in December 2009 a total of 33.2 billion videos were viewed online... in one month!

Video entertains and educates

Video is both audio and visual which makes it not only more entertaining but also more memorable. It's no surprise that these days more people watch movies than read novels, and scientists have found that using audio and visual content together makes people retain more than twice as much as when using only audio or visual components. We live in an increasingly multimedia based world.

Video gets shared

Website users share videos more often than they do websites or blog posts. Videos are more likely to be shared by email and the ever popular social media websites.

Videos make a site dynamic

Videos add dynamic appeal to a site by their mere presence.  These days website users are overloaded with text information and a video provides a great change from the text.  Videos also show that you are more savvy with technology and possibly a leader in your industry.

Video is great for Search engine optimisation (SEO)

YouTube as a search engine

YouTube itself is now the second largest search engine online and accounts for nearly 28% of all Google’s searches. Without video this massive market cannot be reached.

Google searches

Google own YouTube and have been actively pushing a more multimedia online experience. Google now list video results separately. For an example type “farming” into Google and you will see a section titled “videos for farming”. This effectively means that if you have video content then you have two chances of showing up in any Google search. Either your site or your video could show up independently of one another. That gives you a big advantage when it comes to getting noticed.

Improvements in video search technology

It used to be true that video couldn’t be “read” (keywords extracted) by the search bots, but now it is! YouTube have introduced closed captioning options when a video gets uploaded which means not only is the description indexed (along with the selected keywords), but also every word spoken in the video can be indexed as well by uploading a transcript along with it. This improves your chance of getting to the right people by adding a massive amount of text that can show up on any given search query.

Ideal for new and small sites

Video SEO is also a powerful tool for new and small sites. Normal website results gain strength over time and for their size but video works differently. Google takes no account of how old a video is or its length etc when determining its rank. This gives you an equal footing with more established videos on the results page.

Inbound links

Having videos uploaded to other sites allows you to gain inbound links. Not only can those links be followed to your site but also the fact of having them gives you an advantage with Google pagerank system.

With input from Nathan Hawkins from Insite Media (www.insitemedia.co.nz)

Stay tuned for our follow-up post on how to produce video for your website...

If you already have videos you'd like to add to your website, learn more about how to embed them on your website.

Before you optimise your website for the search engines you need to decide what keywords and key phrases you will target in the search engines.  You will want to target keywords and phrases that your target customers will be searching on.

Try to think about keywords and phrases that are not too common. Also think about combinations of keywords such as “barbeque steak, order online, New Zealand”.

Think about your target customer– put yourself in their shoes.  If you were your customer, what would you type into a search engine if you were searching for your product or service?  Unless you have a well-established brand, they will definitely not type-in your brand name.  They are going to search for the type of product or service they are looking for, or the features of the product or service they are looking for.

Start brainstorming a list of keywords and phrases that your target customer is likely to be searching on.  Think about what your product or service does.  What are the features?

Check out your competition to see what keywords they are targeting.  You can use the Meta Tag Analyser on the Zeald website to check out the keywords your competitors use. (www.zeald.com/Resources/Free+Tools/Meta+Tag+Analyzer.html)

Think about misspellings, variations and strange ways of typing your key phrases. It’s amazing how much traffic you can receive based on words that are spelt incorrectly.

Geo-Targeting Keywords
Geo-targeting your keywords is where you target your keywords at a particular geographical region or population segment.  Remember – most search engines are global.  But if you can only deliver products or services within a specific geographical location, then consider targeting your keywords at that geographical area.  For example, if you deliver Indian meals in Albany, Auckland, then use keywords like “New Zealand, Albany, Indian Food”.

Finally, once you have a long list of keywords and key phrases it is time to do some analysis on them to see which are the best ones to target.  The best way to do this is to use a 'keyword research tool'.  An outline of the different keyword research tools is below.

1. Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com)
   The most popular of all the keyword research tools.  There is a simple free version and then a paid version that has more functionality.
2. Google Adwords Keyword Research (adwords.google.com)
   Google Adwords contains a keyword research tool within it available for anyone who has a Google Adwords account.

Based on the information provided by your keyword research tool, you should be able to narrow your list down to a small set of keywords and phrases to target.

Now you should be able to produce a list of the following:

• No.1 Keyword or Phrase - Your No.1 keyword or phrase is the priority keyword or phrase that you would like to target in the search engines.
• Secondary Keywords or Phrases - Your secondary keywords or phrases should be a short list of secondary keywords and phrases that you would also like to target.

Once you have discovered your target search phrases the next step is to saturate the content of your web pages with these keywords. Ensure that important keywords have pages of content specifically dedicated to them.

This section looks at how you can optimise your web pages to increase your chances of achieving good page rankings, for target keywords and phrases within the search engines.

Search engines rank your web page, for a keyword or phrase, based on the location of the keyword or phrase and the frequency the keyword or phrase appears in your page. Location is where on the web page a keyword or phrase is located and frequency is how often it appears on the web page, with some locations more important than others. Each of the key locations is outlined below, ranked in order of highest importance:

Theme your web pages

One of the best ways to optimise your web pages is to structure them into well defined themes.  One of the best aspects of themes is that they help keep your website well organized and on-topic - something that can become quite difficult as your online presence evolves and grows.  A correct theming structure will help you maintain a clear delineation between the different areas of your site, and allow you to target specific keywords and keyword variations to particular sections.

A themed website should follow a structure similar to this:

• First level:  Buy Meat Online in New Zealand
• Second level:  Buy Beef Online
• Third Level:  Buy Beef T-Bone Steaks Online

The key is to forget about the search engines as much as possible and just write and create your site with the single purpose of reaching your target audience.  Stay focused on this goal alone.  When you are done, then you can review it in the light of the guidelines below and tweak it to fit.

Content optimisation guidelines

• Incorporate the important key words and key phrases in the 'Heading 1', 'Heading 2' and 'Heading 3' formats.
• Optimise your meta data so that it includes your key words and key phrases.
• Include key words and key phrases in your internal links between pages whenever possible.

Title

The most important place to locate your keywords or phrases is in your web page titles. The title is the text that appears in the title bar of the web browser.

Headings

The second most important place to locate your keywords and phrases is in the headings of your website content. Within any web page you can have different levels of headings (heading 1, 2, 3 and so on). ‘Heading 1’ is the most important, with sub-headings having less ‘importance’.

Main text

The main text is one of the key content areas of your web page. It is the key area where you can influence the frequency of a keyword or phrase on your web page.

Graphics

Text that is inserted as a graphic on your web page cannot be ‘indexed’ by the search engines. However, graphics can include something called ‘alt’ text, which describes what the image is ‘about’, and this can be indexed. Make sure you use the ‘alt’ field to describe what each of your images is about.

Meta data

Meta data is the information that is included on a web page that is invisible to the online user, but is visible to a search engine. Meta information is designed to explain to a search engine what a web page is about. There are a number of different types of Meta information that can be included in a web page. The two most important types are:

Meta description

The Meta description in a web page describes in ‘plain English’ what the web page is about. The Meta description is very important, as some search engines will use this to describe your web page in the search results.

Meta keywords

The Meta keywords in a web page outline the key words that best describe the content of your web page. The use of Meta keywords has been subject to abuse by many authors in a quest to obtain higher search engine rankings. Because of this, many search engines now disregard Meta keywords completely, so do not spend too much time on your Meta keywords selection.

It is difficult to balance the needs of writing good sales copy versus the needs of writing copy that is optimised for the search engines. It is something that you will have to work out to achieve the best balance that you possibly can. That or hire one of our specialists to do this for you.

Look to write your copy so that your shortlist of keywords and phrases appear in the elements listed above as often as possible. Try different variations and measure the results.

A careful balance

It is difficult to balance the needs of writing good sales copy versus the needs of writing copy that is optimised for the search engines.  It is something that you will have to work out to achieve the best balance that you possibly can. That or hire one of our specialists to do this for you.

Look to write your copy so that your shortlist of keywords and phrases appear in the elements listed above as often as possible.  Try different variations and measure the results.

If your website is new and the search engines dos not know about it, you need to submit it and tell them about it so they can list it.  If the search engines already know about your website it may not be necessary to submit it. You can find out if the Search engines know about your website by doing a "site:www.yourwebsiteaddress" search. The search engine will tell you how many pages of your website that they have a record of.

Please note. you do not have to submit your sitemap. The search spiders are programmed to crawl the internet in search of new content, new websites. Sometimes it can be faster to get your website in the search results by simply getting a good link to it. 

Search engine submission can be a complicated process; fortunately there is just a few search engines to submit to these days. Many of the other search engines are "Powered" by the primary ones.

So how do you submit your website to the search engines?

Avoid using automated submission services

There are many automated search engine submission services.  The best advice we can offer you regarding them is – “Don’t use them!”.  Search engines hate automated submission services as they can be used to ‘spam’ the search engines.  Most search engine submission processes differ slightly, so after coming this far with your optimisation why risk receiving a ‘black mark’ next to your website’s domain name in the search engines.

Free organic manual submission

If search engines are a key part of your website promotion strategy then we believe it is absolutely vital that you spend time submitting your website to the search engines manually.
This method has no guarantees and it usually takes a number of weeks (up to eight) before your website is indexed.  The key search engines that offer free submission are below:

• Google (www.google.com/addurl.html) or even better Submit your sitemap to Google
• Yahoo (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit)
• Bing (search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx)
• SearchNZ (www.searchnz.co.nz/addsite/)

Paid inclusion

Pay per click advertising (PPC) means that you pay to have your website included in a search engine.  By paying for inclusion you ensure that you are included in a search engine as a matter of priority.  Pay per inclusion programs give you no guarantee about where your website will rank on search pages. So for certain keywords or phrases, you still need to properly optimize your pages.  All that pay-per-inclusion programs guarantee is that your website will be included in their search engine’s index.

If you need your website to be included within a search engine quickly then you need to consider pay-per-inclusion. We recommend that you use both methods.

Learn more about Pay per click advertising (PPC)

Monitoring

Now that you have submitted your website to the search engines you will need to wait for the search engines to index your website.  This usually takes between two weeks and two months (unless you have paid for inclusion).  Once you have been listed it’s time to monitor your listings.  There are a number of ways you can do this:

• Simple Monitoring - The simplest method of monitoring is to go to each of the search engines that you are targeting and type in your keywords or phrases.  Take note of where your website appears in the list.  Look at who appears above you and then research what they are doing to make their website rank higher than yours.
   
• Web-based Tools - When you Submit your sitemap to Google, you create a Google Webmaster account. The Google Webmaster account provides a set of tools which help you monitor the Search engine listing and ranking process. Market Leap (www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm) provides a number of free web-based keyword analysis tools.  These tools will allow you to check the rankings of each of your keywords and phrases.
   
• Software Packages - Web Position Gold (www.webposition.com) is the #1 solution for SEO.  It provides a whole range of tools for all aspects of SEO.  Included as part of the Web Position Gold package is the ability to monitor your rankings on target keywords and phrases.  If you are serious about your SEO, and the DIY route is for you, then you should consider purchasing Web Position Gold.  The standard edition costs US$149.

Metadata is the information about a data source. For example, a document contains information, but there is also information about that document such as the title, author and publisher - this is the metadata, in other words, data about data. If we compare this to the web, every webpage has a number of metadata elements that can be set for the page. Standard metadata that should be displayed for every webpage is: the page title, the description and the keywords or phrases that summarize the content of that page and which appear within it.

Metadata is not visible on the site itself but is used by some search engines and directories to gain information about the website in order to index (catalogue) it correctly. Different search engines use metadata differently and some don’t use it at all.

The following is an example of effective metadata, that could be used by the site www.currypantry.com
 

Title
Welcome to Curry Pantry, suppliers of premium Malaysian Curry Pastes.
 

Description
Visit Curry Pantry for authentic, premium Malaysian Curry Pastes and sauces. For gourmet food without fuss, see our recipes for vegetable, lamb, seafood, beef or chicken curry.
 

Keywords
Curry, curries, pantry, curry pantry, sauces, pastes, recipes, Malaysia, Malaysian, cuisine, food, history, lamb, chicken, seafood, vegetable, meat, vegetable curry, seafood curry, chicken curry, lamb curry
 

 

Writing Your Metadata

Keywords / Phrases
When preparing your metadata, prepare your keywords / phrases first. This is because they should also appear in your page description and title. They should reflect the specific content of the page that you are writing for and you should consider the following:

• What are the key words / phrases that your potential customers might enter into search engines or directories to find your company, site and products?
• What keywords / phrases do your competitors use?
• How competitive is your industry (you may want to select a niche and focus upon that)
• Keywords should be limited in number (Search engines generally only permit a maximum of 25 or so, all other keywords appearing after that are ignored)
• Keywords / phrases should not be repeated too many times (Search engines ‘see’ both of these strategies as ‘spam’, false attempts to increase search engine rankings and will ignore the page / site.)

 

Compared to our example of effective keywords above, an example of a keyword /phrase list that would not be accepted by search engines because it is too repetitive / long would be;

Curry, curry, curry, curry, curry, curry pantry, curry pantry, curry pantry, curry pantry, curries, curries, curries, curries, curries, curries, Malaysia, Malaysia, Malaysia, Malaysia, Malaysian food, Malaysian food, Malaysian food, Malaysian Food, beef, lamb, chicken, seafood, vegetable, meat, beef, lamb, chicken, seafood, vegetable, meat, beef, lamb, chicken, seafood, vegetable, meat, food, food, food, food, recipes, recipes, recipes, recipes, recipes, Malaysian recipes, Malaysian recipes, Malaysian recipes, Malaysian recipes.

When entering your keywords / phrases they should all be separated by a comma. For example:
keyword1, keyword2, phrase one, phrase two

 

Page Description
Having selected your keywords, it is now time to prepare your page description. This is displayed by most search engines when returning a listing of relevant sites based on a specific search. Users search for sites by entering keywords or phrases into search engines or directories and the page description is displayed beneath the title in the list of results.

For the description, write one or at most two sentences describing the page content. Incorporate your page content / metadata keywords while writing it so as to increase the chance of the web page being found by search engines and directories.
 

Page Title
The page title is also used by search engines to gain information about the website and is the most important piece of metadata on any webpage. The page title is displayed in search result listings and also in the browser title bar whenever the page is viewed.

It is advisable to make the title no more than approximately 10 words long as anything longer than this will be truncated. Try to include keywords, rather than just the company name - preferably keywords & phrases that are also used in the page content, as well as in the metadata.
Below is an example of how our metadata example would appear when returned by Google as a hit.

Welcome to Curry Pantry, suppliers of premium Malaysian Curry Pastes
 

Visit Curry Pantry for authentic, premium Malaysian Curry Pastes and sauces. For gourmet food without fuss, see our recipes for vegetable, lamb, seafood, beef or chicken curry… http://www.currypantry.com - 15k - Cached - Similar pages
 

 

Summary

Metadata is an often overlooked component of many websites and many webpages. Every webpage that you have should have at least a ‘Page Title’ and ‘Page Description’. The ‘Keywords / Phrases’ meta-data is nowhere near as important as the other two as it is only used by one or two search engines – but it never hurts. All the best!!

 

 

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“Is Your Website Producing Amazing RESULTS?”

 

If your answer is anything less than a resounding yes, then you need to learn about Zeald and the ‘Websites that Work!” program. Because results that are anything less than ‘amazing’ means you are selling yourself short!
 

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© Zeald 2005 – All Rights Reserved

We are often asked if including target search terms in the domain name or website address will help to improve a websites search engine ranking.
It is hard to say for sure as the search engines don't like to give away their secrets for their ranking methods, and also these methods change on a regular basis - so something that may work today might not work tomorrow. But many experts believe that using search terms in the domain name will help to give a website a leg-up in the search engine results for those search terms.

The theory behind this technique

In theory it seems unlikely that the search engines would place any emphasis on search terms used in the domain name. When you think about it, by doing this the search engines open up the domain name for abuse by website owners.

However there are other reasons why incorporating search terms in the domain name might help to give a website a boost in the search results:

1. Often when other people link to a website they will simply use the address of the website. For example if I wanted to link to the website of Ron Giles, one of our e-business consultants, I might say: to find out more about Ron Giles visit his website http://www.website-consultant.co.nz/. This is a backlink to his website which incorporates the search terms of his domain name "Website Consultant." The search engines of course give points for inbound links, and they use the "anchor text" or the text used in the link to help them calculate the subject of the website. 
2. By using target search terms in your domain name you might be able to fool Google into thinking that the search terms are actually the name of your company. So when a user searches for the phrase "Website consultant" Google doesnt know if you are searching for a company called "website consultant or simply website consultant in general. If you can convince Google into thinking that the name of your company is your domain name, you will improve your chances of obtaining a top rank ofr those search terms, espicially for a local search.

It does seem likely that using search terms in your domain name will give your website a slight boost in the search engine ranking process. However you will need to consider if it would be worth the hassle of changing your current domain name and risking a drop in your current ranking for a period as Google recalculates your rank.
By all means it is definitely worth considering if you have a new website that is not live yet.

Which search terms?

If you choose to incorporate target search terms in your domain name to help with your search rank, you will need to decide on what search terms to use.

Consider your Branding

This is the hard bit. Firstly you need to decide if you should target your brand  name, or theme or both. If a primary objective of your website is to build a prominent brand for your business then you should target your business name or as close to it as you can. Make it short, snappy and memorable.

However, if your brand name is something quite unique, for example "Zeald" and you know that there is very few if any other examples of the term used online, then most likely you will achieve a number one rank without even trying. In which case, you could try targeting a theme, instead of or as well as.

Consider a theme

If you decide to target a theme as opposed to your brand, or as well as your brand, you will need to find and decide on a search phrase that:

1. Makes sense
2. is short and snappy 2-3 words max
3. is most relevant to your business
4. produces a high volume of searches
5. produces a high volume of sales or leads
6. produces good revenue for your business
7. you have chance of competing in the search results

This is the tricky bit. How do you work out what these two or three words are? The answer is keyword research.

Keyword Research

There a numerous tools out there that will help you to determine the search volume. Try Google Adwords keyword tool which allows you to segment the searches by geographic region. When you have a shortlist, use Google Insights to compare your top phrases and check that your phrase is trending upwards in popularity. Check the competition to ensure that you stand a chance to obtain a top rank for those search terms.
Calculate the relevancy. This is the really difficult bit. Some how you need to get inside the head of your target user and understand what they are thinking and "guess" what they are searching for when they enter those search terms into Google. This is referred to as the "commercial intent."

Make it local

If your primary target market is from a specific geographic region, then focus on this with your search terms and also your domain name suffix. If your target market is from Christchurch New Zealand, then make sure your domain name is a .co.nz and consider using Christchurch in your target search terms.

Make it short

In most cases many of the obvious short names will have been taken already, so you will need to be creative with your choice of search terms to ensure your domain name remains short. For example you want to avoid a domain name that reads "www.auckland-and-christchurch-ecommerce-website-consultant.co.nz" This does not look professional and appears obviously "spammy"

Use hyphens to separate each keyword

Because you are not able to use spaces in your domain name, you should use hyphens (-) to let the search engines and users know where one word stops and another word starts.

Consider using both theme words and your company name

If you can include you business name with theme words you capture the best of both worlds. This technique can also be a way to make the domain name unique. For example: www.Ron-Giles-Websites.co.nz

Use other domain names to point at your website

Once you have decided on your keyword rich domain name you will need to set it up to be the "primary" domain name for your website. Google will only list and rank a website by one domain name. You can have other domain names for your website and point them to it, but Google will only use one to rank and list your website with. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to do this or ask your website developer. If you already have an existing domain name that already has a presence with Google you need to make sure that you tell Google that you are changing your domain name. You can do this through webmaster tools.

With the keyword rich domain name setup as your primary search engine link, you should also think about links that are easy for your customers to understand and remember. For example Ron Giles might use www.auckland-ebusiness-consultant.co.nz for his primary domain name, however this is very generic and quite a mouthful for his users to remember. So he might also secure and point a simple domain name such as www.ron-giles.co.nz

Dont sweat it

With any marketing initiative you need to weigh up the return on your investment. You need to consider the amount of time and effort you spend on it and the results you might obtain from it.
The additional boost a keyword rich domain name will give your website might be subtle. If you struggle to find a good keyword rich domain name or you are uncertain about the choice of keywords, don't sweat it. Also think about the long term benefit of building brand recognition for your business.
Could that time be better spent elsewhere?

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a "text link" on a web page and is often made obvious with an underline, a blue colour or both.
Good anchor text will give visitors and search engines an “idea” for what the page being linked to is about.

Writing good anchor text makes it easy for website users to navigate and will also help with the ranking of a web page in the search engine results.
For example if someone liked this article they could link to it with the following anchor text:
Read this great article from Zeald
Unfortunately this does not let the search engines or the users know what the article is about. A better way to construct the same link might be:
Read this great article from Zeald about how to write good anchor text

Good for the users

Quick navigation - When users navigate a website, they will often “scan” a page looking for information of interest to them. By describing the page we link to in the anchor text, we make it easy for users to navigate to the areas they are interested in.
It is not helpful when all the links on a page say “click here” The user is forced to read the context of the link, or the text around the link to learn where it might take them.....often the user may not have the time or patience to do this.

Confident navigation - Descriptive anchor text in a link helps the user feel confident in their navigation. If all the link says is great article, the user will be unsure whether it is of interest to them, or if it will answer their question. It is very frustrating for the user when you force them to “guess” where the page will take them and even more frustrating when they guess wrong.
Of course when we don’t tell users to “click here” we need to make it obvious that they can “click here” We need to ensure that the link is obvious. Nothing says “link” like electric blue text with an underline. But sometimes more subtle variations will also suffice.

Good for the search engines

Inbound links build the trust and credibility of a web page when they are “judged” by a search engine during the ranking process. The text used around and within a link is very important for the search engine to determine the subject matter of the page that the link is connected to.
A good example of this is Google bombing. Google bombing is internet slang for an attempt to raise the ranking of a page in Google search results, using the Anchor text of external links (for humorous or malicious reasons). The most famous case targeted the phrase “miserable failure” and linked to the biography page of George Bush on the White House website.

When a user searched for “miserable failure” on Google they could find the official biography of George Bush at the top of the results page. Due to a targeted Google bomb

So how do we optimise our anchor text for the search engines?

Use good keywords. It is a waste of time optimising a page using a search terms that no one searches for, just as it is a waste of time optimising a page for an extremely competitive search term that would be impossible to gain a first page rank.
As is the case for most search engine optimisation efforts, you need to carefully research the keywords you want to target. You need to determine the search terms that will generate the greatest amount of conversions for your website business, and of course that you will be able to achieve a high ranking for.

Learn more about how to find the best keywords. Did you see what I did there?

Don’t use the same anchor text for all inbound links. Try to use variations of your anchor text. Mix it up. Google are continually looking for “spam” websites, and nothing says “automated links” than keyword stuffed repetitive link text.

It can be a subtle difference and should fit the context of the page that the link appears on. Try replacing some less important keywords or using plural. For example:
A great article explaining how to write good anchor text
Or like this
A great article about optimising your anchor text

The links should appear natural. That is what Google is looking for.

External links and internal links

We need to incorporate our search terms in the anchor text of the links that point to the page. By links we mean both the internal links within your own website and also the external links from other people’s websites.

Internal links are easy, but getting backlinks has got to be the greatest challenge of Search engine optimisation, especially backlinks that have meaningful anchor text.

You will have more control posting links to directories, forums and paid advertising, but outside these more obvious methods, we lose that control and it becomes much more difficult to dictate your anchor text.

But that is a separate article.....

Key phrase density is a very important factor when search engines are determining how highly they should rank your web page for a particular search phrase.

The Zeald Key Phrase Analyzer will help you to see which words and phrases are currently used the most on your web pages.  You can also use it on your competitors web pages to discover exactly what phrases they may be targeting.

The Zeald Meta Tag Analyzer will help you to see what meta-tags you currently have on each of your web pages.  Correct use of meta-tags within your web pages can improve your rankings on some search engines.  You can also use the analyzer on your competitors web pages to discover exactly what meta-tags they are using.

Optimising your website for the search engines is only one option for generating traffic for your website. Another option is to advertise on a search engine.

When advertising on a search engine, you pay for an advertisement to appear when a person searches for a particular keyword or phrase, relevant to your website. There are three common models search engines use for charging for advertisements- in fact; these models are common across all forms of online advertising:

• Pay-Per-Impression (CPM)

• Pay-Per-Click (CPC)

• Pay-Per-Acquisition (CPA)

Advertising Types

There are two common types of search engine advertising:

• Fixed Placement Advertising

• Pay For Placement Advertising (PFP)

PFP advertising can change day-to-day as advertisers change their bid amounts, and as new advertisers start bidding. Almost all PFP advertising utilises a Pay-Per-Click method of charging. The advertiser pays each time a person clicks their advertisement.

PFP advertising is great for small businesses as you can trial it with very little advertising budget. You can often secure visitors to your website for just a few cents. Its only downside is that it can require substantial time and effort to manage it successfully.

The rest of this section focuses on PFP advertising, as this is the form of advertising that will be most applicable to the majority of our readers.

PFP Advertising Providers

In the PFP advertising world there are two main providers:

• Google

• Overture
  Overture is the biggest supplier of PFP advertising. Similar to Google Adwords, Overture allows you to bid on keywords that when searched show an advertisement on the right-hand side of the page under the tile – ‘Sponsored Results’.

There are also a number of smaller PFP providers:

• FindWhat (http://www.findwhat.com)
• LookSmart (http://www.looksmart.com)
• Kanoodle (http://www.kanoodle.com)
• Enhance Interactive (http://www.enhance.com)
• Mamma Media Solutions (http://www.mammamediasolutions.com).

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“Is Your Website Producing Amazing RESULTS?”

If you answer is anything less than a resounding yes, then you need to learn about Zeald. Because results that are anything less than ‘amazing’ means you are selling yourself short!

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Directory Submission

Directories can have a serious impact on the results that you achieve in the crawler-based search engines. Submitting to the directories is a good idea – but they can take a substantial amount of time to list you. So start early!

One of the most important things that you must prepare before submitting yourself to a directory is an objective description of your website. Directories will frown upon any description that seems promotional in nature and will reject your listing. Make sure you prepare an objective, well-written description of your website before you start.

The key directories to list in are:

• Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org/add.html) – Free submission

• Yahoo (http://au.docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/splash.html)
   
  All commercial website submissions to the Yahoo directory attract a fee. This is currently AUD$495 annually. This is expensive and you will need to carefully consider its importance before proceeding. Our recommendation would be to do everything else and if you are still struggling to get good search engine rankings then consider submitting your site to Yahoo.

 
If you are a New Zealand-only business then it may well be worthwhile submitting to a number of New Zealand-based directories:

• NZPages (http://www.nzpages.com) – Free submission

• NZWebsites (http://www.newzealandwebsites.com) – Free submission

• NZSearch (http://www.nzsearch.co.nz/addsite/) – Free submission

• NZS (http://www.nzs.com/cgi-links/add.cgi) – Free submission.

 
 

Advanced SEO Techniques

If your search engine optimisation is vitally important, you may want to consider some of these more advanced SEO techniques:

 

• Theme-Based Sites

   
  This technique involves creating a separate website that focuses on providing information that is related to the product or service you sell. If you are selling meat you could create a site that explains the details behind all the different cuts of meat– where they come from, what their characteristics are, and so on. Theme-based websites generally rank very well in the search engines because they are keyword rich! The theme-based website can then be used to channel visitors through to your main sales site.

 

• Single Product or Service Sites

   
  Single product or service sites are websites that focus on a single product or service. This allows you to focus on the keywords and phrases that you want to target for that product or service. You can build a separate website for each of your products and then link between each of the websites (thus increasing your link popularity). This sort of approach can also have benefits for your sales copy, in that it enables you to write copy that is completely focused on the product that you are trying to sell.
   
  Single product or service sites can work well when you have between one and ten major products.

 

 

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Professional SEO

 

In this section we have covered the fundamentals of SEO, which is an extremely dynamic and forever changing ‘science’. There are numerous sub-topics that we could have covered in this section– but SEO is a topic that could fill books.

If SEO is a crucial element of your website promotion strategy then you should seriously consider getting some help from a professional SEO company. SEO companies specialise in this area and are current with everything that is happening in the search engine world.

Talk to your E-Business Consultant or the Support Team if SEO is a crucial part of your website marketing strategy. Your consultant will be able to take you through the different professional SEO packages available.