Thursday, October 2, 2008

Search Engine Optimisation for Lead Generation

By David B. Ascot

When you do search engine optimisation, you are increasing your website's rank among search engines such as Yahoo, Google and MSN. In Australia, Google is the main search engine with over 80% of the search engine market share. Tests have also revealed that Google searches almost always become either sales or inquiries much more often than searches by other major search engines do. In other words, this means that Google gives you the most high-quality search traffic. This is why you should focus your efforts to optimise on Google.

With Google, you'll find that you rank quite well as compared to the others. For this, there's a three-step process by which you can perform search engine optimisation. This topic is fairly complex and companies spend a lot of money getting this done for them. However, you can do this with three relatively simple steps.

Step 1: Perform Keyword Research Establish keywords and phrases that are relevant to your services or your product so that you can focus your search engine optimisation efforts on those particular keywords or phrases. For example, if your business operates within a local area, your keyword research is normally going to be pretty easy. It's likely to be that your keywords and keyword phrases will simply include what you do and then your area. For example, if your business is as a carpet cleaner and you operate in Sydney, your keyword phrases likely to be something to the effect of "Carpet cleaning Sydney." You can also use keyword and search tools like inventory.overture.com, which is free, or keyworddiscovery.com or wordtracker.com; the latter two are paid search tools, but they're also somewhat more sophisticated than inventory.overture.com.

Step two: Optimising on page You need to optimise your website content, too. For high search engine rankings, make sure the right keywords show up on your webpages. This is part of the story, too, but it's also an important part of the puzzle we call "optimisation." Here are some important tips on optimising webpages.

1. Your Page Title Should Be Keyword-Rich. The title that appears in your browser in the blue bar at the very top should have keywords in it; this is because it's also the title in Google's search results. Make your title concise, short, and rich in keywords. It should have the most important keywords at the front of the title. As an example, if your carpet installation business is located in Sydney, you can say, "Carpet Installation Sydney - Install Carpet Surry Hills Sydney." And put the most important keywords at the front of the sentence. You can see that it's a bit of repetition, but it's pretty keyword rich and it doesn't sound too strange, which should get you more exposure.

2. Have a Keyword Rich Description. This is properly called the Meta Description Tag. It is the part of your website code that describes the content on the page. Your descriptions should be keyword rich and written in complete sentences. For our digital printer, the description could read: Digital Printer in Surry Hills, Sydney. Providing Competitive Colour Digital Printing and Binding Services. Print Business Cards, Flyers, Brochures and Menus, Postcards, and More

3. Look at Your Headings. Search engines place great importance on headings because they seem to find important page content. Ensuring that your headings and subheadings are keyword rich is a good start. For example, Full Colour Digital Printing Services in Sydney

4. Make Sure You're Page Content Is Suitable. At least one paragraph of each textual page on your website should be rich in keywords. You can also repeat the keywords you use in your headings in your content. Using a mix of related key phrases is also good. For example, saying, "Carpet Cleaning, Cleaning Carpets, Clean Your Carpets," is more suitable than using the same phrases over and over again.

5. Links Matter, Too. Links, too, indicate page content to search engines, importantly. Avoid using generic links such as, "Click here," or "find out more." Instead, make your links keyword rich by using such phrases as, "Check out our carpet cleaning services here," with "carpet cleaning services" as the hyperlink.

Step-3: Off Page Optimisation Off-page optimisation, or linking strategies, is the third and final stage. Every incoming link to your website is considered by Google as a vote for your website content by other websites. The reason why many businesses SEO efforts fail is that they focus exclusively on using keywords on web pages but they lack a linking strategy. Here are a few tips to start pushing your site up the ranks through linking strategies:

1. If You Can, Have People Who Link to Your Site Use Keywords. Let's say a client of yours is going to link to your website. If you can, ask them to use keywords like "inexpensive carpet installation" instead of your company name or a directive like "click here."

2. List Your Sites on Authority Directories. Listing your website on website directories which are well regarded by search engines can help to improve your rankings. Most of these so-called authority directories charge a fee for listing. A fact that serves to keep out lower quality websites. Three of the most important authority directories are: Yahoo.com.au, botw.org and business.com. Please note that I'm not talking about email scams that offer to submit your site to 34 million directories for $49. You should only bother submitting your website to directories that are well regarded by search engines.

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