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Gelst Business Advisors Ltd, Registered in England, Company No. 6342291
Reg. Office: 10 Defoe Avenue, London, TW9 4DL, UK, Tel. +44 20 7096 0885
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Best practice SEO – increase the number of organic search visitors to your site
On-page optimisation
(note that Gelst considers on-page search optimisation as one of the three techniques necessary. The other 2 are link building and engagement on social media)
Decide on the topic for which you want to increase your organic site visitors
Research key phrases for this topic so you get an idea of how people search for information
Make a seed list of key phrases (typically consisting of 2 to 3 words) you think are relevant around your topic
Use the Google Adwords Keyword tool to expand this list, get other ideas for key phrases and get an idea of search volumes.
Use the Google Adwords Keyword tool to find the search volumes in your target geography and use these a first indication to decide which key phrases are relevant and specific (for example: if a key phrase is used by 15000 searchers last month, where you expect only a few hundred, then you know that you’ll have to refine the key phrase further as it’s still too broad)
Research the competition - use some of your key phrases to get a feel for your competition (who, how many, for which key phrases) on the search engine results pages.
Use well optimized competitors’ sites for further ideas by running Google Adwords against these
Check that you stay in line with any Trademark laws when using keywords, especially words that are now generic, but at one point in time used to be someone’s brand (and perhaps still are)
Use your internal site search engine to see where those key phrases are in use on your site
Fit the new page or pages within your site structure (not necessarily all together), or decide which existing pages you want to optimise for this topic
Tip: use your on-site search engine to find out which pages already address some of the key phrases you are optimising for
Check the page itself:
Ensure the URL of the page makes sense and is linked with one of your key phrases.
Ensure your page title makes sense to a human person and contains a key phrase for your topic (do this for all pages around your topic). Consider including your brand.
Ensure your page body text addresses the key topic and therefore uses several of the key phrases you have found (but do not spam the page, it has to make sense for a human reader!)
Structure your page well and ensure you use the right tags (and the system’s CSS style sheet, so do not put in styling manually yourself in the page itself if you can avoid it) to indicate their level
Example: Title of the page: E-Mail Management for law firms
One of the headings could be E-Mail Management for client x (which happens to be a law firm)
Put that heading in as a heading level 1 (for example). To check this, the html tags around this text need to read <h1>E-Mail Management for client x </h1>, and when all is well this heading will show up with nice styling as defined in your overall site’s style sheet
Fill in your robot.txt file, especially when you want to avoid that a search engine visits certain pages on your site (e.g. to avoid a search engine visits almost identical pages seemingly twice), but even if you only want to tell the search engine they can visit your entire site
Ensure your page is internally linked with other pages relevant for this topic, so you’re in essence telling the search engine (and your readers) where else you have interesting information about this topic.
Choose the internal links themselves in your page with your key phrases in mind – where this makes sense of course!
Ensure your site’s sitemap is up to date
Fill in your metadata (Keywords and Description). While this is not considered very important anymore, it’s better to do it as this info still shows up in places
Fill in your ‘Alt’ tags for your images (search engines are not that good yet at recognizing what’s in an image – and for that matter neither are accessibility tools used by for example your visually impaired visitors)
Ensure you provide good internal links to the page you are optimizing, especially from the homepage.
Use an SEO friendly content management system, and if you are not, put the necessary measures in place to adapt
Also, if you are using flash and javascript, you probably know what to do to use them in a search engine friendly way as that goes beyond the scope of this document.
10. Test your site yourself
Use one of the many tools available on the internet to check your page
Use a text only browser such as Lynx to test your page and look at your page the way a search engine would
Install measurement, web analytics, with Google Analytics for free and several other excellent packages on the market, there is no excuse anymore, so you know whether indeed people are visiting your site and where they come from.
Realise you’re not done. The world has moved on and so have search engines. Link building and social media (i.e. are you part of the discussion around this topic?) are now at least as important as well optimised pages.
Finally, be patient. Like Rome, your online reputation is not going to be built in one day. Look at SEO as an investment that takes time (count in weeks or even better in months), but, with maintenance, can drive visitors to you for years.