SEO FOR BEGINNERS 2 -ten dollars -- HOW CAN I GET MORE VISITS?
SEO For Beginners -- Plus a bit of fun (Please excuse the Back to the Future images -- It's on tele..)
(Doc -- Great Scott Marty, you're right. I should have gone to Spec Savers..)
SEO is a very hard industry to be in. I have to spend literally all my time outside of work reading to keep up to date with what's going on in the world of SEO and my day job is SEO, where I work on a handful of site constantly to try and get them more visits and in turn more money in the way of conversions.
So first things first, it's not an easy task to do it right. It takes years of learning and a lot of time to keep gaining visits. Some people try and go the easy way and spend money on links. If you get caught out by Google for this, then you might as well have not bothered in the first place..
On the other hand there are some things that you can do to get a few extra visits to your site per month. The majority of these i'll explain over the course of this 10 part min series, but rest assured, you do not need any technical knowledge at all!
Do you have a website? Yes you do! (If you don't, you can do some SEO, but probably not on the site itself as it doesn't exist..)
Do you know what these are? (you probably don't)
- Google Keyword Tool
- Matt Cutts
- Meta Title
- Anchor Text
If you do, head of elsewhere on the blog to use these tools to their full potential. If you don't continue reading.
- What we are trying to do is here is not SEO in the traditional sense of improving rankings, we are just trying to get the SEO beginners on their way by generating some traffic for them to build upon in the future.*
(Marty tried his 1,000 yard stair on his mum, girlfriend, mum.. Confused..)
Content
Over much deliberation I've decided that this is the easiest thing you can do is content. If you are running or managing a blog or website and have little or no technical knowledge.
Facts
Blogs survive on content.
Recent changes to Google means that content is more important than most other factors.
Social media is driven on quality content.
(Doc trying to be the first man in space with a Delorian..)
What next?
We write. First of all we are going to try and make search engines aware of the copy that we write by injecting words into the copy that is being searched for by a certain amount of people. These types of words can also be referred to as 'keywords'. A keyword is a word or a set of words to create a phrase that more than 1,000 people in the UK or the World search for on a monthly basis. An example of a keyword would be something simple, such as 'online' or to turn that into a phrase we would have 'online marketing expert' (you're thinking about me now right?). I know without even having to check that these keywords will have a high amount of search traffic each month because they are every well known phrases.
What I want you to do now is think of a word that describes your core business. If you're a retailer you might be selling 'shoes' or if you're in a service industry your core business might be 'solicitors'.
The majority of one word key phrases are a little too hard to gain positions for in rankings, so what we want to be able to do is stretch these words out to phrases which have three to five words in them and these will make up our keywords.
(Seriously Doc, what you're about to do to Marty is not cool, even if he paid for it..)
Let's go back to the example of 'shoes'.
It really doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what people are searching for. Try adding a colour, or a location to create a longer keyword. This way when we have a longer keyword, the chances are there will be less competition for this keyword. Here's an example of a few longer keywords
Red shoes Birmingham -- Colour, core, location
Black football boots adidas London -- colour, core, make, location
If hazard a guess that there would be more search volume for the second keyword without even going to one of the millions of tools available to check (genuinely not looking so if I'm wrong please let me know!)
The fact remains that the second keyword contains five words and the first contains three. This shows that not all different keywords have to be shorter to be more beneficial to your site.
Keyword Strategy
So we know what you're core business is and we know how to generate different keywords 'off the cuff' to be able to enter into any copy that you are writing for your site.
You now need to be able to be confident enough to write copy for your website and inject theses sorts of keywords into the copy. Write sentences around them if you have to, but remember the golden rule -- no more than three different keywords per 250 words otherwise you're over doing it.
The following page is taken from a Google search for 'black football boots adidas London' where the first result is Lovell Rugby
As you can see from the results I've highlighted in colour the instances of each keyword shown on the page.
This is exactly what you need to do. We have the two keywords that we are using for our case study
Red shoes Birmingham
Black football boots adidas London
Break each one of these down to one or two words and inject them throughout your copy. This way search engines will be able to place the words together to form more and larger keywords, getting you more bang for your buck, literally.
The example below is a page taken from Ezinearticles.com
I searched the whole of Ezine for 'shoes' and the page above was the first result displayed. Again what I have done is highlighted the keywords for 'shoes' in yellow on the page. The point is that this page is ranking so well for shoes is because they have many instances of shoes throughout the copy. It is also written well and gives a unique angle.
The point I am trying to make is that when writing an article just spend a few minutes thinking about what type of keywords you would like to use.
Warning!
There are some methods of optimisation that go back a way but are still being used today. Adding a large quantity of keywords into a piece of copy is called 'keyword stuffing'. If you do this not only do you alienate your readers because the copy does not become eligible, search engines will hate you for it too. Try and keep your total keywords to under 10 throughout your piece of copy (for now!).
(Needles you slappa da base..)
Think about your core business
Add colour, brand, location
It's literally as easy as that. If you want your copy to bring in traffic, you have to be able to add keywords to the page to make it rank. The more you increase your chance of ranking by creating compelling content and doing basic SEO, the more chance you have of generating visits to your page.
I hope you enjoyed SEO for beginners 2. Please come back for part 3!
Do you want to watch the Back To The Future trilogy now? Yeah me and you both..Get the box set HERE for 7 quid or hang your head in shame for the rest of your life that you don't own it..
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