Web Marketing (On-site SEO)
Having a good looking and up to date website is very important to your business and making
sure people are able to find it is also very important.
One of the best ways to get website visitors
is through search engines such as Google and to ensure that you get a good position in
the search engine results pages then SEO is vitally important.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the process
of getting traffic from the different internet search engines.
Various different methods are used and the
aim is to get as high up as possible on the search engines for different search keywords
and phrases.
The main search engines used throughout the UK are Google, Bing and Yahoo.
SEO is often about making lots of small changes
to your website that will ultimately make a massive difference to your website marketing.
Search engine optimisation does not have to
be difficult and can be very financially rewarding for your business.
On site SEO refers to search engine optimisation
techniques that you can do yourself on your website or web page that you are trying to
improve its ranking.
We will run through some of the most common and effective methods later in the video.
When talking about SEO techniques, you will
often here people mentioning both white hat SEO and black hat SEO.
White Hat SEO or Good SEO Practices is when
SEO techniques used follow good practise and search engine guidelines.
Black Hat SEO or Bad SEO Practices is when
the SEO techniques used don’t follow good practise or follow the search engine guidelines.
Black Hat SEO used to be correct many years
ago, but due to many people misusing the techniques they are now frowned upon by most and their
use can affect your SEO and search engine rankings.
Some examples of white hat on-site SEO techniques
include
Page Content – ensuring that your website has well written, relevant and unique page
content is extremely important for SEO – it is probably the most important factor in SEO.
Your page content needs to be well written
and be written with both website visitors and the search engines in mind.
It is so important for your content to be relevant to the exact thing you want to be
ranked for, this is quite often a particular service or product, including enough references
of your particular keywords.
At the same time, the text needs to be written in a way that is easy to read and understand
from a users perspective.
There is no point having content containing your keywords that isn't easy to read or understand.
Avoid keyword stuffing when writing your document and ensure that it reads naturally.
You also need to make sure that you regularly
update and change the text on the site.
We recommend that you update the page content on a weekly basis as Google and the other
search engines favourably rank sites that are regularly updated with new content.
Correct use of Headings and HTML tags in your
content – It also important to ensure that you correctly use a range of headings and
HTML tags within your page content.
The main heading on your page should ideally contain your keyword/phrases and should use
the html H1 or Heading 1 tag.
The H1 tag should only be used on the page once and you should try to place as high up
the page as possible. Any sub or secondary headings should then use either a H2 or Heading
2 tag or lower.
The uses of em tags and strong tags should also be used within the page content to provide
emphasis to certain words.
As standard, any word in an em tag will be displayed in italics whilst a strong tag displays
the text in bold.
It is a good idea to use these as it shows to both your website readers and the search
engines that the word(s) are important.
Meta Details – It is also important to ensure
that meta details for the pages are used.
The main meta details to include for SEO are Page Titles and Meta Descriptions but there
there are also Meta Keywords too.
The Page Titles are those found in the search
engine results pages as well as at the bar at the top of the page in your web browser.
When adding titles to your page, ensure that
there are relevant to the page content, include your keywords and it is a good idea to separate
each keyword phrase by commas.
The ideal length for the page title is around 6 -10 words. Try to avoid generic or default
headings and make sure they are unique for every page.
The meta description, although not strictly
influencing your SEO ranking, is sometimes the description you see in the search engine
results page and is extremely important on helping you get clicks from the search engine
results pages.
The Meta Description give you a great opportunity to tell potential visitors what your web page
is about and so including a unique and descriptive sentence containing your keywords is key.
Ensure that you don't use vague descriptions
or descriptions that have no relation to the page itself. The idea length for any meta
description is around 150 to 160 characters.
Meta key words were used by the search engines
to rank sites, they were a list of concise key words and phrases that are relevant to
the page content.
However, Google no longer use these when ranking a site due to misuse by some websites.
It is not important to use these on your website but there is no real harm adding them as some
older search engines still use them.
Image Alt Attribute – Using Image Alt attribute,
usually referred to as a Alt Tag, is also another important on-site SEO factor.
Image Alt text or Alternative text is used
as alternative information source for those who have images disabled on their web pages
or for those who are visually impaired.
The text is important as not only will it help in those scenarios but can also tell
the search engines what the image is about, if possible try to include your keywords
in your image Alt text.
When hovering over an image on your web browser, this is often the text that pops up over
the image.
The Alt text is indexed by search engines such as Google along with the rest of your
website text and therefore adds to the word count.
URL Structure – Ensuring that your URL structure,
the path to a page on your website, e.g. www.domain.com/about-us, is optimised is
also important for SEO.
Your page names and URL structures should be descriptive, be easy to understand and
ideally contain your keywords.
A URL that is descriptive and easy to understand will help you with both the search engines
as well as visitors to your site.
A URL such as www.domain.com/search-engine-optimisation
is so much better than a difficult to understand URL that contains random amount of letters
and numbers such as www.domain.com/omc4rm9uv4?=541.
Not only is it easier for a search engine to understand but your website visitors will
also understand better and be able to remember the exact URL.
As mentioned earlier, Black Hat SEO or SEO
Bad Practices are some SEO techniques that shouldn't be used in your SEO strategies.
Examples of these methods include:
Keyword Stuffing – this is when you include your keywords too much in your page content.
Invisible Text – avoid using any invisible
text that a search engine can see but your website visitors cannot.
Some ways people have done this is by making
their text colour the same as the background colour.
Doorway pages – these are basically pages
which are fake and can only be seen by search engines and not by your website visitors.
Duplicate Content – avoid using a content
that appears elsewhere on your website or anybody else's website. Ensure that your content
is hand-written, well optimised and unique.
Cloaking – this is when the page given to a search engine crawler is different to the
page given to your website visitors.
By using Black Hat methods, if detected, and Search Engines are being very advanced in
detecting these techniques, you risk being banned from Search Engine listings and will
not appear in any search results.
You would then have to contact the Search Engine in question for them to take you off
their “banned” list and this can take days, weeks, months at their discretion.