There are two final areas that are crucial to optimising your site for search engines – site structure and links.

Improving your site structure

Customised URLs

Get your story out: Create inbound links (Sean MacEntee)

It’s important to use keywords in your headlines, alt tags, anchor text and headings, and another good spot is to place them in your page URL. This is useful both for real readers and the search spiders.

For example change a URL like this:

www.nettlesoup.com/blog/ID/9004608/0098356

To something more descriptive like this:

www.nettlesoup.com/blog/seo/structure-and-links

Categories

You can improve your structure even more by organising your content into categories. Again this is helpful for both search engines and real readers. In the example above, the robots can see immediately that the topic on ‘Structure and Links’ is a subcategory under ‘SEO’. This is a powerful indicator of what is covered in the post.

This sort of structure also adds a ‘breadcrumb’ trail for readers so they know where they are in your site.

Don’t forget to edit your structure before you post your page! You can’t change it once it is published.

Creating inbound links

Inbound links are links to your site from other sites. The search spiders evaluate the number of sites linking to your site and also the quality of those sites. So a link from a government agency is worth a lot more than a link from your friend’s blog.

So how do you create inbound links?

Just like making friends, there are lots of ways you can generate networks just by participating in online networks. Make connections online and people will probably link to you, it’s that simple.

• Make contact with bloggers:
  • comment on their posts
  • review their sites
  • interview them
• Make contact on Facebook and LinkedIn:
  • Find and connect with people and groups that cover your subject
  • Comment on their posts
  • Share information
  • Promote your news
• Make contact on Twitter:
  • Find and connect with people and groups that cover your subject
  • Follow them
  • Retweet them
  • Promote your news

You can also generate interest by providing free content that others can use, with a link back to your own site, such as articles or photos.

Ping Search Engines

You can let search engines know that you’ve updated your content using a ping service like pingomatic.com.

About the Quick & Dirty Guide to SEO

The easy way to improve your ranking on search engines through search engine optimisation.

• Part 1 What is SEO explains what search engine optimisation means
• Part 2 Targeting Keywords looks at targeting keywords, and reveals the most important keyword tip for improving you SEO
• Part 3 Targeting Keyword Phrases: Extra Tricks looks at other tricks for keywords targeting
• Part 4 How Do You Choose Keywords? explains how to choose your keywords
• Part 5 Structure and Links looks at structuring your site and link building.

For the truly lazy, I’ll also include a REALLY Quick & Dirty Guideto SEO but it’s hard to understand without reading the rest.

So now we know where to put our keywords, but that may be putting the cart before the horse. Let’s talk about how to choose your keywords in the first place.

Google AdWords screenshot

This is a huge area and it’s important because to rank well, your page must include the exact phrase entered by a searcher, in the right places. So for example if you sell tennis equipment you need to know if people are searching for ‘tennis gear’ or ‘tennis equipment’ or ‘tennis rackets’. You also might want to know how many people are searching for these terms, and other information like where they live. Based on this data you can choose keywords that will drive the best traffic to your page and optimise your page for them.

Researching Keywords

Researching and strategizing the targeting of keywords chews up a lot of the working week for SEO pros. It’s not always best to target the most popular terms. The internet is a huge arena and you can often find a large audience even if you target a less-popular phrase. You might choose keywords based on a number of factors including:

• Popularity – how many people are searching for a keyword phrase?
• Competition – is it better to target a less-popular term with less competition?
• Audience – is it better to target a term used by a particular segment of the audience?

How to Research Keywords

Targeting strategies like these obviously take a lot of research and testing. Not everyone has time to get into the nitty gritties of a fully researched keyword campaign. But there are a couple of things you can do quickly to select the best keywords for your pages.

• Gut feeling – this is the starting point for all keyword research. Sometimes it just means spending a moment in the user’s seat – what would you type into a search engine if you wanted to find the information on your web page? Research has shown that most people enter two or three word search phrases into engines – so it’s best to target 2-word or 3-word keyword phrases.

• Keyword tools – find out what people are typing into search engines. There’s a lot of great information you can access for free that gives you data on search trends. You can get stats on how many people are using different keyword phrases, and also information on similar phrases that you might like to target.
• Trial and error – if your keywords aren’t very successful at first, test different keywords over time to see if you can improve your traffic.

Keyword Tools

There are lots of tools available to give you data on keywords. Some you pay for and some are free. My favourite free tools are:

• Google’s Keyword Tool – this site gives you information on your phrase, including how many searches are conducted on Google for it each month. Importantly, it also gives you a list of similar terms that you might want to try instead. And it lists the competition on each. This enables you to decide whether you want to target the keywords with the most traffic and most competition, or go for a less popular term, but one which will give you fewer competitors.
• Google’s Trends – this site offers information on how keywords are trending over time, so you can see if your terms are the ones being used right now. It also offers geographical information on where people are searching for your terms.

Common-Sense is Better than Nothing

Selecting keywords is one of the trickiest part of SEO. Constant refinements are necessary to keep a good ranking if you make it to the top, especially for keywords with a lot of competition.

However, even if you select keywords based on nothing but common sense and place those keywords in good spots, as explained in earlier posts, you’ll still be doing a great job of improving your search engine ranking.

Of course keywords are not enough to ensure a good search engine ranking on their own. In the final article we’ll look at structuring your site and building links.

About the Quick & Dirty Guide to SEO

The easy way to improve your ranking on search engines through search engine optimisation.

• Part 1 What is SEO explains what search engine optimisation means
• Part 2 Targeting Keywords looks at targeting keywords, and reveals the most important keyword tip for improving you SEO
• Part 3 Targeting Keyword Phrases: Extra Tricks looks at other tricks for keywords targeting
• Part 4 How Do You Choose Keywords? explains how to choose your keywords
• Part 5 looks at structuring your site and link building.

For the truly lazy, I’ll also include a REALLY Quick & Dirty Guideto SEO but it’s hard to understand without reading the rest.

Use keywords in your link text (image: Yandle)

Last time we looked at title tags because they are so important when you are trying to improve your ranking. But there are a few other areas that can help too.

Meta tags

The text in <meta> tags is not checked by the search engine spiders, but it is very important for human users. This is the short summary text that (usually) appears beneath the link text in the results pages.

The HTML looks like this:

<meta name="description" content="Nettle Soup - inspired copywriting, meticulous editing, flawless proofreading. Nettle Soup can improve your text with good, old-fashioned attention to detail.">

The search engine results look like this:

The meta field should give people enough information and enticement to make them click through to your site and it can be useful to add keywords here as they come up in bold in the search results page.

Again, there’s a character limit here of around 160 characters, after which we get ellipses and avoid using special characters here as they can be cut off – stick with letters and numbers.

Top tips for optimising meta text

1. Be concise – Only 160 characters will display on the results page
2. Be enticing – You are writing for people here, not spiders, give them a reason to click through
3. Use keywords – keywords will come up in bold on the results page

Headings

Headings are an important part of online writing. They’re navigational aids that help readers skim the page and quickly assess what it’s about. They also break up long text into bite-sized, neatly labelled chunks.

And just like human readers, the search engine spiders skim-read your page and single out the headings, though this isn’t their favourite area to check. Still it’s worth optimsing headings to give spiders and humans a summarised version of the page content. Put some keywords in the headings if you can.

Top tips for optimising headings

1. Chunk up your text with lots of  headings for easy skimming
2. Put keywords in your headings

Alt text

The alt tag gives a text description of an image that appears on your page. Typically it’s displayed if the image fails to load, or read aloud in audio aids for blind web users. But it’s also used by the search engine spiders. They can’t see the image but they will pay attention to the alt text to learn what the image is about. So this is another great place to put your keywords.

It looks like this in the code:

<img src="navig/logo.gif" alt="Copywriting : Editing : Proofreading - Soup up your copy with Nettle Soup">

Top tips for optimising alt text

1. Remember to use this field when you add pictures to describe the picture
2. Put  some keywords in alt text

Anchor text

Link anchors are the phrases used to hyperlink to another page – the underlined link text. The spiders are very interested in links, for establishing both the content and popularity of pages. They assign the keywords in the linked text to the destination page, rather than hypertext on your page. So the most useful SEO work you can do for your own page is on internal links – ie, links to pages in your own site.

It looks like this:

<a href="http://www.nettlesoup.com.au/">Nettle Soup offers great copywriting</a>

Try to use keyword phrases as hyperlink text for your own pages.

Top tip for optimising anchor text

1. Don’t use anonymous hypertext links like ‘click here’
2. Select a phrase that describes the content you are linking to
3. Put some keywords in the anchor text

As I mentioned in the last article, a good web copywriter can take the hard work out of all of this, creating keyword-driven text without alienating human readers.

Of course targeting keyword phrases is only possible once you have chosen your keywords and this is one of the trickiest areas of search engine optimisation and the subject of my next article: How Do You Choose Keywords?

About the Quick & Dirty Guide to SEO

The easy way to improve your ranking on search engines through search engine optimisation.

• Part 1 What is SEO explains what search engine optimisation means
• Part 2 Targeting Keywords looks at targeting keywords, and reveals the most important keyword tip for improving you SEO
• Part 3 Targeting Keyword Phrases: Extra Tricks looks at other tricks for keywords targeting
• Part 4 How Do You Choose Keywords? explains how to choose your keywords
• Part 5 looks at structuring your site and link building.

For the truly lazy, I’ll also include a REALLY Quick & Dirty Guideto SEO but it’s hard to understand without reading the rest.

There’s a lot of talk in SEO about keywords. Let’s take a look at what they are, and where to put them.

Targeting keywords will instantly boost your SEO

In this section I’ll outline the quickest, easiest way to instantly improve you SEO: – optimising the <title> tag with your keywords. These little tags are crucial. If you only do one thing to improve your site’s SEO – this is it.

What are Keywords?

Think about how you behave when you hit a web page on a quest for information. There are millions of pages out there and you know from experience that many of them are junk. So you scan your eye quickly over the text, looking for signs that this page has the information you are looking for. In essence, you are looking for particular words that answer your search query.

For example, imagine you want some organic liquorice tea. You enter ‘organic liquorice tea’ into Google and in 0.19 seconds it returns a pile of web pages with those exact words bolded up as clickable links – those are your keywords!

Targeting Keywords

A lot of SEO is based on targeting keyword phrases. Pages will rank higher if they feature the exact keywords the searcher entered as a search term in important parts of the page. The search engine spiders pay more attention to the words in particular parts of the page, so these are the best places for your keywords. Those places are:

1. Title tag
2. Meta descriptions
3. Headings
4. Alt text
5. Anchor text

The title tag is the single most important keyword slot to optimise if you want to improve your SEO, so I’ll concentrate on that in this post and I’ll move onto the other areas next time.

Instant Optimiser: Title Tags

The title tag is the text in your HTML source code surrounded by <title> and </title> tags. Its job is to describe the page content and it appears in the title bar of the browser when the web page is displayed.

The <title> appears in your browser title bar

The title text is also the text that is picked up and displayed in search engine results – it becomes the link text you click on to visit the site. In the same way, it’s often used by other sites as the link text when they add a link to your page.

So this is a very important piece of text to get right, and you haven’t got much room to do it. Only 65-70 characters will display on the search engine results page, any more will trail off into ellipses.

SEO no-no - a trailing <title> tag

It’s also important to place your keywords at the start of your title, as the spiders pay more attention to the words at the beginning, and so do real users selecting which link to click.

So say I’m targeting ‘copywriting’ as my keyword. From an SEO perspective, instead of using ‘Nettle Soup – the home of captivating copywriting’ it is better to say ‘Copywriting, Editing, Proofreading – Nettle Soup’.

Remember, the title tag is not the heading of your page, but rather it provides the link text to it. It’s like a calling card, introducing and summing up your page as it travels through the internet.

Top tips for optimising <title> text

1. Prioritise title tags – This is the single most important text to optimise with keywords
2. Be concise – Only 65-70 characters will display on the results page
3. Make an entrance – Place keywords right at the start of the title

How can a copywriter improve your SEO?

Copywriters specialise in whipping big, hairy ideas into gorgeous, well-behaved sentences. A web copywriter is a great person to enlist to get your keyword phrases into the crucial places, without sacrificing readability. They are also specialists in best-practice techniques for human readers, like using the active voice, writing verb-driven sentences and cutting needless words.

Targeting keywords is about more than just getting the right words into the title tag – there are a few more keyword tools in the SEO toolbox, and that’s the subject of the next post.

About the Quick & Dirty Guide to SEO

The easy way to improve your ranking on search engines through search engine optimisation.

• Part 1 What is SEO explains what search engine optimisation means
• Part 2 Targeting Keywords looks at targeting keywords, and reveals the most important keyword tip for improving you SEO
• Part 3 Targeting Keyword Phrases: Extra Tricks looks at other tricks for keywords targeting
• Part 4 How Do You Choose Keywords? explains how to choose your keywords
• Part 5 looks at structuring your site and link building.

For the truly lazy, I’ll also include a REALLY Quick & Dirty Guideto SEO but it’s hard to understand without reading the rest.

Next up: some extra tricks for targeting keywords on your pages.

SEO is not as hard as it looks (image: Danard Vincente)

• Part 1 What is SEO explains what search engine optimisation means
• Part 2 Targeting Keywords looks at targeting keywords, and reveals the most important keyword tip for improving you SEO
• Part 3 Targeting Keyword Phrases: Extra Tricks looks at other tricks for keywords targeting
• Part 4 How Do You Choose Keywords? explains how to choose your keywords
• Part 5 looks at structuring your site and link building.

For the truly lazy, I’ll also include a REALLY Quick & Dirty Guideto SEO but it’s hard to understand without reading the rest.  So let’s get started…

Part 1 – What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation – getting a web page to rank higher in search engine results pages like Google.

Why do you want it?

Search engine optimisation will help people find your site. It will jack you up higher on the search engine results pages than your competition. Around 62% of search engine users click on a link within the first page of results, and 90% within the first three pages. So if you rank higher on the search results you’re more likely to get that click.

How do search engines decide how to rank pages?

Exactly how each search engine ranks pages is a tightly held commercial secret, but essentially a search engine like Google will send out ‘spiders’. These are automated programs that assess each page on the internet based mainly on two things – the words used on the page (and where they’re used) and the number of links to the page, which indicates their popularity.

When a searcher enters a keyword phrase the pages are ranked for that phrase according to ‘relevance’ and ‘importance’ from the data collected by the spiders.

What easy SEO changes can help your site rank better?

SEO is a huge area with many specialised agencies dedicating themselves to it 24/7. It’s also an area where the goalposts are constantly shifting as the search engines get better and better at assessing the relevance and importance of sites. But there are ways to improve your search engine rankings.

The three main easy-optimise areas are:

1. targeting keyword phrases
2. creating inbound links
3. improving site structure.

In the next articles I’ll go through each of these areas, as well as explaining step-by-step how you can easily optimise your site. Next up: Targetting Keywords.