Key areas we will cover in chapter 13:

• ✓ what SEO is and why you need it
• ✓ getting the most out of your website
• ✓ basic search engine optimisation (SEO) tips
• ✓ growing your site
• ✓ encouraging visitors.

One of the great things about social media is that it pushes traffic back to your website, where your visitors will find more information about your services or products. There are a few more things you can change very easily to improve your site’s search-engine results and also impress your visitors. I had a chat with two professional SEO companies to make sure I had everything bang up to date for you, and the following is what Glenn Marvin (managing partner of SureFire Search Marketing) and Richard Conway from Pure SEO came up with.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation (SEO):

• is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results
• encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic and increase awareness in search engines
• has many aspects, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web
• is sometimes simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand
• isn’t just about building search-engine-friendly websites. It’s about making your site better for people too.

Why does my website need SEO?

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo!. Although social media and other types of traffic can generate visits to your website, search engines are the primary method of navigation for most Internet users. This is true whether your site provides content, services, products, information or just about anything else.

Search engines are unique in that they provide targeted traffic — that is, people looking for what you offer. They are the roadways that make this happen. If search engines cannot find your site or add your content to their databases, you miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your site.

Search queries (the words that users type into the search box) carry extraordinary value. Experience has shown that search-engine traffic can make (or break) an organisation’s success. Targeted traffic to a website can provide publicity, revenue and exposure like no other marketing channel. Investing in SEO can have an exceptional rate of return compared to other types of marketing and promotion.

Search engines are smart, but they still need help. The major engines are always working to improve their technology to trawl the web more deeply and return better results for users. However, there is a limit to how search engines can operate. Whereas the right SEO can net you thousands of visitors and increased attention, the wrong moves can hide or bury your site deep in the search results where visibility is minimal.

In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO also helps boost rankings so that content will be placed where searchers will more readily find it. The internet is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies that perform SEO will have a decided advantage when it comes to visitors and customers.

Get the most out of your website

There are some quick and simple areas that you can focus on to make your website work better for you.

Page title tags

A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. Title elements have long been considered one of the most important on-page SEO elements (the most important being overall content), and appear in three key places: browsers, search engine results pages and external websites.

Google typically displays the first 50 to 60 characters of a title tag, or as many characters as will fit into a 512-pixel display.

If you keep your titles under 60 characters, you can expect at least 95 per cent of your titles to display properly.

A title tag should:

• contain the keywords that relate to that page
• be no more than 69 characters in length
• be relevant to the content on that page
• be unique for every page.

Page description tags (meta descriptions)

Page description tags or meta descriptions sit on each page, again buried at the top of the page for the robots, but humans can also see them when they do a search with Google and the descriptions of the website pages come up.

It’s important that these are filled in as they are the descriptions that you and I see when we decide whether to click on that particular search result or the next one. These short paragraphs are your opportunity to advertise content to searchers and to let them know exactly whether the given page contains the information they’re looking for.

Think of a meta description as your Google search result advertising copy. It draws readers to a website from the results page. Crafting a readable, compelling description using important keywords can get more people to click on the links to your site. Therefore, a call to action is a good idea. The description needs to be 156 characters or fewer, as this is all that will appear in the search result, and it should be relevant to the page it relates to. Every page on the website should have a unique description.

Ask yourself what makes you click on a particular link when you do a search. Search for your own business and see what your page descriptions say: do they make you want to click the link for more information or are your competitors’ links more compelling?

To update your page title tags and meta descriptions you will need to have access into the ‘back end’ of your website where the coding sits: some content-management systems (such as WordPress) will allow you into these areas to add them in. If not, it’s back to your web person.

Content

Have you ever been asked to provide content for your web developers to add to your website? This is by far the biggest challenge most business owners face when it comes to good-quality SEO in the modern digital age. Stepping back from the day-to-day grind of running a business and putting a creative hat on to write compelling, engaging, relevant information about each and every product and service you offer can be mind numbing. For many it just goes into the too hard basket and a last-minute hastily written page of information is thrown together as deadlines loom.

Over the past few years, Google has made a concerted effort to value the overall experience of its users. A result of this is that Google now places greater emphasis on the overall value of your content than on the specific keywords it contains.

As business owners we are often so caught up in what we know about our business that we make the mistake of using industry terminology and acronyms rather than laypersons’ terms (for example, a doctor may use the term ‘haematoma’ rather than ‘bruise’). Before you write your copy it certainly pays to research the common terms used when talking about and searching for your products and services. Talk to your non-industry friends, use the Google keyword planner — www.adwords.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner — and get a good feel for the terminology you should use. The great thing about Google’s approach to overall context and intent is you can mix the terminology up and you definitely do not need to repeat the same words over and over (our industry term for that is ‘keyword stuffing’).

Does this mean that you shouldn’t optimise your content for keywords? No! The search engine still relies on keywords to some extent to understand the relevance of your content, but it has improved at understanding the context of the content. Keyword stuffing is dead and can hurt both your rankings and your website performance.

Headlines

In website jargon, headlines are called H1 tags. The term ‘H1 tags’ simply refers to the main heading. When someone is searching for ‘drains unblocked’, the Google robots rush out and find all of the pages that have that search term on the page, they sort them into order and they give you the results. Whether that search term is in the page content or in the headline, how many times it appears and a bunch of other variables will determine where your website listing will come up. As no-one really knows how the Google algorithm runs, we can only work with the bits that we do know. With our previous example, ‘drains unblocked’ appears in the headline, while the rest of the content uses slightly different words such as ‘drainage’ and ‘drain laying’. When the robots find the pages with the search terms required, they sort the pages into order of importance, working from the top of the page down. As H1 tags are at the top of the page, you have a better chance of being found if you have those search terms in your headings.

Title tags vs H1 tags: commonalities and differences

Both tags should provide titles that represent the overall message of your web page, so the best way to optimise title tags and H1 tags is to write for your readers while following SEO best practices.

The main differences are:

• Title tags appear in search engines and the web browser’s title bar.
• H1 tags appear within the body text (ideally near the top of the web page).
• Search engines give more weight to title tags than H1 tags.

Some best practices for H1 page heading tags include:

• Have exactly one unique H1 tag per page.
• Ensure the H1 tag acts as a meaningful title for the page content.
• Use meaningful keywords in the H1 tag.
• If it makes sense, add a geographic term to the page heading.

To create an H1 tag for your web page content, use your focus keyword phrase word for word in your H1 tag. Keep the text succinct and to the point. There is no length requirement for the H1 tag, but it should make sense to the person visiting your page so they can quickly identify what the page is about.

Uploading PDFs

You can upload PDF files to get your page ranking higher. Search robots can now read PDF files that you add into your pages and as these are usually content-rich, they are great to use.

Image alt tags

These are alternative tags used on images. Their primary function is to enable a visually impaired person, who may not be able to see the image, to understand what it is by using their audio website reader tools. Also, if an image fails to load properly, the alternative text that appears will again enable you to understand what the image is about. Additionally, if someone is searching just for images, your alternative description may well come up in their search.

When you set your alt tags up for each image on your website, you need to not only add a proper description but also include your keywords again. Going back to our blocked drains, a picture on the home page of Danny and his truck might have the alt tag ‘Danny’s Drainage unblocking drains’. You get the picture?

Link building

Link building refers to how many links are pointing to your site from other sites, and is an important part of optimising your site. Having lots of links pointing to your site from other site sends the robots a message that your page must be important — otherwise why would others link to you? The issue here is that not all links are equal as the authority of the page that is linking to you has a lot to do with it.

Google looks at the quality of the links coming to your site, not just the quantity, as an indicator of trust and value. To put this into context, would you value five links to Danny’s Drainage from random Russian blog sites?

Can you get an article published on your local or national newspaper’s website or a TV station’s site with a link back to yours?

A word of warning about companies that offer link exchanges through spam emails. They may sound like a good deal at the time as they link to you and you link to them. However, in reality what happens is you link to them and they return the link; then, a couple of weeks later they unlink from you, which just leaves your link to them in place — not very fair, but common practice. The only one to win that game is the initiator of the link swap. In practice, exchanging links has little to no value. The only reason to do it would be if the other website is very relevant to your business. For example, Danny’s Drainage may have a link from and a link to a website that is an industry body.

One of the best ways of getting good-quality links pointing to your page is to create high-quality, engaging information — something we call ‘link bait’ in the industry. This is where you have something on your website that organically makes people want to link to you. Examples of link bait could be:

• a free ebook
• an infographic
• a high-quality industry blog.

Google search console (previously known as Webmaster Tools)

Go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools and take a look around because here you will find a whole bunch of website backend information that you don’t get in your analytics, such as security and author statistics. It’s free so you may as well use the information provided.

Extra URLs

Most companies have just one website with one website address, but have you thought about using several web addresses and pointing them all to the one website? If you are wondering why on earth you would want to do that, here’s why:

• You may have a long company name.
• You may have a hard-to-pronounce company name.
• You may have a hard-to-spell or hard-to-hear company name.
• You wish to add keywords to your URL address.
• You don’t want anyone else to buy that name.

Natural or clean URLs

When creating new pages throughout your website, give some thought to how the URL of the page will look, and by that I mean is it simple enough? When you are directing someone to a particular page from, say, a TV commercial or newspaper advertisement, you want to give them something that is easily remembered and easily heard. For example, the ‘Spark’s Tech in a Sec’ ad on TV always points back to its web page: www.spark.co.nz/help/techinasec/ rather than something like www.spark.co.nz/124567techpage or something else equally hard to remember.

Keep the URL simple and logical and make sure it contains keywords where possible. The speaking page on my site is called ‘Social media speaker’, which is exactly what the page is all about, and the page name is easily remembered and easy to pass on.

Grow your site

Each and every time you add new content to your website, the robots take note. Think of the robots as mice and your website content as their food, and boy do they like to eat. Each time you develop a new page on your site, they run off, devour it and head back home. Once they have done this a couple of times in a month they begin to see that you are providing for them on a regular basis and they make a mental note to call back to your site more frequently than to other sites that have not provided for them in a while. Keeping your website pages very active will stand you in good stead with Google and the search rankings, as this is one area they monitor. Sites that don’t get this attention — and there are many — are limiting their chances of being found. If you look at the main news sites, new and fresh content is added at least daily, so they grow massively over the course of a year.

Most websites are built within some sort of template, which means adding a new page is simply a matter of clicking a button or two and — hey presto! — you need only to add keyword-rich, interesting content for your readers.

Having a widget showing your latest social media posts is a great idea as content changes regularly when you make new posts.

Google AdWords

This is a great way to get visitors to your site, but I am not going to go into that in this book as it is a bit of a minefield and I suggest you get a professional to set it up for you. You can, however, set it up yourself if you are prepared to put a bit of effort into monitoring and tweaking your ads when needed. Set yourself a monthly budget that you can afford and give it a go. I would recommend getting in touch with someone who really knows it inside out and take their advice.

Claim your ‘Google My Business’ page

Ever wondered how sometimes when you search, there is a map that shows up and a bunch of listings, all with the little red Google location pin on them, usually from A to Z? That is where Google My Business comes in.

Go to www.google.com/business/ and set yours up. For it to work properly, you need to make sure it is fully filled out and kept up to date.

When it comes to adding your address, you will need to provide an actual physical address and Google will send you a postcard with a verification code on it to activate your listing. When you have filled it all out, work on getting some client reviews on your page. Google uses reviews as another bookmark. You may have noticed you can link your business page to a Google+ page here too.

Conclusion of chapter 13

Your website says a lot about your brand so do make sure people can understand it and navigate it easily and that the robots can find it when someone is searching for whatever it is you have to offer. By following the easy steps in this chapter, you will be giving your website a fighting chance to generate results for you.