Search Engine Optimisation for Lead Generation
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 2: Optimising on Page Optimise your webpage content. For the best search engine optimisation and rankings, you have to make sure that the right keywords appear on your webpages. This is part of the story, true, but it’s just part of what you have to do to optimise your webpages. Here are some other things you should do to make sure you optimise effectively.
1. Include a Keyword Rich Title on Your Page. The title is the label that appears in the blue bar at the top of your web browser. It also appears as the title of your webpage in Google’s organic search results. The title should be short, concise, keyword-rich and you should put the most important keywords at the front. Take the example of a print shop located in Surry Hills, in Sydney. A good tile for them might be: Digital Printer Sydney – Colour Digital Printing Surry Hills Sydney. As you can tell its pretty keyword rich, there’s a little bit of repetition there, not too much and it doesn’t sound too weird.
2. Your Description Should Be Keyword Rich. The description is also called the “meta description tag.” This is part of your website code and describes the page’s content. Write descriptions in complete sentences and make them keyword rich. For the carpet installation service in Sydney, for example, it could read something to the effect of, “Surry Hills, Sidney Carpet Installation. Installing Carpet at a Reasonable Price.”
3. Pay Attention to Headings. Headings are very important for search engines because they seem to help them find page content is important, too. Make sure that your subheadings and headings are keyword rich for a good start, for example, using a heading such as “Carpet Installation Services in Sydney.”
4. Page Content Matters, Too. Your page content needs at least one keyword rich textual paragraph per page. You can repeat keywords used in your headings in the content. Use a mix of related keyword phrases, such as, “Carpet Installation Sydney, One-Day Carpet Installation, Fast Carpet Installation,” and so on instead of repeating the same phrases over again.
5. Look At Links. Links are another important indicator of page content. You should avoid generic words and links such as, “Find out more” or “Click here”. Instead, use keyword rich link test such as, “View our complete range of digital printing services”, with “digital printing services” as a link.
Step-3: Optimise Off Page As Well Utilising off page optimisation or linking strategies is the third and final stage in making sure your website is search engine optimised. When people link to your website, these are known as “incoming links,” and Google considers these as votes for your website. Many businesses fail because they only focus on using keywords and webpages but don’t utilise a linking strategy. Here are a few things you can do to start making sure your site goes up the ranks with 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.
Filed under: Marketing