BECOME GOOGLE’S NO 1 IN 3 EASY STEPS

Paula Wynne
2012-02-01 10:25:00.0

Award-winning entrepreneur and author of Pimp My Site: Your DIY Guide to SEO, Search Marketing, Social Media and Online PR, Paula Wynne offers practical tips on how to get your website ranked high on Google.

Today you will learn 3 Key Ways to Optimise Your Website

Why long tails keywords are vital
Outrank your competitors with Metadata
Get found with On Page Optimisation

As I explain in my book, Pimp My Site, keywords are the most essential ingredients to ensure your site will be visible and indexed on search engines. Using them correctly and effectively will drive potential customers to your site. Without strategic keyword placement, your site will be a mish-mash of gobbledy-gook to the search engines. Your main objective is to be high up the organic results. It is a complex business, but one that is easily learned and achieved by even the most extreme novice. Before I started my business, I had no idea how to find the right keywords as I was able to employ agencies to do this for me.

What is SEO? It’s one of those phrases that goes straight over people’s heads and you can see their eyes glaze over as they try to digest the meaning. Essentially, it is the process of improving the ranking of a website within the search engine results. There are lots of different ways to get your website optimised so that the search engines will find you.

LONG TAIL KEYWORDS

What Are Long Tails?

Keywords strung together to form long phrase
1 to 2 words are good but 5 or 6 keywords are better
Use niche and competitive Keywords
Most effective long tail keywords are the ones highly relevant and specific to your business

I run a social networki for self-employed, home-based workers called iHubbub. In our case, our main keywords are extremely competitive - ‘home business’ or ‘home based business’. So, how could we use this keyword phrase to be more specific and relevant to our site? To create an even better long-tailed keyword, we started optimising ‘home business social network’. You see, when your visitors use a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy. In our case not to buy, but to join our site to meet, connect and trade with other home business owners and website start ups. Our site only launched recently and this long tail phrase ‘home business social network’ is already ranked high on Google. We did this with ‘flexible home based jobs’ which took Remote Employment to Google’s No 1 in the world!

METADATA

Inserting Metadata into each page ensures that every page is optimised for particular keywords, with a rich long-tail keyword title and description. You may not realise it, but you view Meta tags every time you see search results in Google. See this search result example, which shows that the title and description have keywords in bold.

It is interesting to note that your Social Media tweets, blogs and posts are also included in Google’s search results.

For example, using the same search term from above (Home Business Social Network), you can also see the following two results Google found in Twitter and YouTube, both using the keywords I searched. The moral of the story: use long tail keywords in your social media, often Google will deliver those results first!

What is Metadata? Metadata is data about data, like a website index. For example: A library catalogue is metadata because it describes its publications. Pimp My Site’s table of contents is a meta-index to describe the book’s details, such as the chapters, text and images. So the table of contents is a meta-index about the book’s data. The same applies to your site’s metadata – it is a meta index about your web pages.

Most importantly, every page should have its own metadata, namely Meta title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords. They should match what is shown on the front end to your visitors.

Why Add Metadata? Your site’s metadata is then added to ‘Page Source’, which is how Google reads your web pages in HTML code.

What is Page Source? This is the place Google finds Metadata about your web pages. Google works this out by indexing the metadata about your pages, matching it to your page content and gives a browser relevant search results when they type their keywords into Google. See the image below which shows how the page title and description match the Meta tags in page source.

ON PAGE OPTIMISATION

On Page Optimisation deals with all the content ‘on your page’ and how you use this to optimise the keywords for that particular page. Each page must be optimised with its own keywords and using strategic keyword placement. Place your rich long tail keywords in the following areas:

1. URL

2. Breadcrumb

3. Page title

4. Description

5. Headers and subheaders

6. Text on page

7. Alt tags – to describe your images and hyperlinks to Google

Checklist

Find niche and long tail keywords
Use Metadata in your page source
Ensure On Page Optimisation performance
Your keywords need to be specific and relevant to your product or service and also to the content on each page of your site

For more advice on how to optimise and promote your website check out Paula's book Pimp My Site: Your DIY Guide to SEO, Search Marketing, Social Media and Online PR