Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. – Wikipedia
I have been working on the SEO of the London Theatre site that I run and decided to write a series of SEO tips taking in all of the factors that have a bearing on search engine positioning.
The goal is to appear on the first page of Google – i.e top 10 – for a chosen search term, or keywords. Ultimately everyone obviously wants to be number one but being top 10 is a great achievement, especially if the search term that’s being targeted is anything like competitive. It’s also worth mentioning that Yahoo, MSN/Live and other smaller search engines have their place, but with the popularity of Google, appearing high in the search engine results pages (SERPS) of Google should be the number one priority.
When deciding what keywords or search terms to target you will have much greater success targeting multi-word search terms of 2-4 words. Not only more success in gaining search engine position but also more success in gaining relevant traffic and sales. Single keywords are going to produce many more results in the search engines to compete with and people searching on a 2-4 word term are also a more targeted prospect.
For example someone searching for “theatre” could be looking for anything to do with theatre such as the buildings, reviews, a definition etc whereas someone searching for “london theatre tickets” is clearly much more likely to be looking to buy.
There are a number of tools around to help you decide which keywords to target such as the Google Adwords Keyword Tool or Wordtracker.
SEO Theory
I am a believer of copying what works. Ideally i’m sure everyone would like to be ahead of the game or an innovator or pioneer of new ideas or whatever, but when it comes to SEO, without knowing exactly how the algorithms work I feel it is better to look at what is currently working for other sites and take a leaf from their books.
SEO Factors
So, just what is important for SEO? SEO can be split into two groups – firstly the on-page or on-site SEO which takes into account things like page content, meta tags etc. and secondly the off-site SEO such as other sites linking to your site.
I will start with going through all of the on-site SEO factors first and then talk about off-site SEO later.
The Title Tag
Starting at the top, the first essential thing to consider is your page title. This is the text that appears across the top of your browser and is between the title tags in your code e.g
<title>Your Title Here</title>
The page title will also be the title of your listing in the SERPS.
If you look at the top 10 sites on Google for the search term you’re targeting you will find that most of them have the search term in the title at least once, sometimes twice. You will also see that one or more of the words in your search term usually appear again in the title but this time seperated by other words. The number of words in the title is also important. On average the top 10 sites will have between five and nine words in the title.
What i’m not suggesting is that you copy one of your competitors title exactly but rather that you look at the average number of words used and the number of mentions of the words in the search term and make up your own page title that fits in with your findings. Also, bearing in mind that this text will appear as the title in the SERPS try to make it a compeling title to encourage people to click through to your site and not one of the others listed on the same results page.
In part 2 – keyword use in the body or page content of your site.
