At last, some common sense about search engine optimisation

I’ve just read a great post on Aaron Wall’s blog about search engine optimisation. Aaron is one of the leading experts on SEO and just talks plain common sense.

Here is an edited version of his blog post:

“There are so many blogs on search marketing.

Then there are so many forums.

And Tweets.

So much SEO noise, and so little time. So how does anyone make sense of it? The deluge can be overwhelming for the experienced SEO, let alone the poor beginner. If you are just starting SEO, here are the ten areas you should spend most of your time on when you’re starting up.

1. Stop reading Blogs/Forums/Tweets/Facebook. Too much noise, takin’ all your time

2. Before you do any SEO, define your niche. What service does your website provide? Who are your readers/customers? What can you provide that your competitors don’t? How are you going to deliver your services and make a profit? There’s no point ranking well for a business that doesn’t work at a fundamental level.

3. Set business-specific goals and include a time frame. “I want to make x in 12 months”. “I want 20,000 RSS subscribers in 6 months”. It’s important to be specific. It’s difficult to measure goals that aren’t specific i.e. “be popular”.

4. Create interesting content. If you know your audience, you already know what content they will find interesting. If you don’t, revisit #2.

5. Links. You need links. Not just the Google-juice, PR-passing kind. Links are the arteries of the web, Traffic travels across links, so all links, crawlable or not, no-followed or otherwise, are valuable. Asking for links from people you don’t know is pretty much a waste of time. It’s a better idea to create fantastic content, then link out to the popular people who can spread the word. They’ll follow their inbound links back to you. Make sure that what they find is remarkable.

6. Do SEO. All that stuff you’re no longer reading in #1? It all boils down to this: put keywords in your title tag, write on-topic content, make sure your site is crawlable, get links to that content, get people to talk about you. Repeat.

7. After a month, look at your keyword referral logs. Take those terms and plug ‘em into keyword research tools. Create a list of 30 keyword terms that your audience would find interesting. Those are your article headings. Write 30 articles. Repeat.

8. Look at your competitors. Your competitors are ranking well for a reason. They’re being mentioned elsewhere for a reason. What are they doing that you’re not? Reverse engineer their sites i.e. who links to them, find out what articles they publish and find out who is talking about them, and why. Emulate them, then go one better. Either that, or stop competing with them directly i.e. define a slightly different niche.

9. Get social. Social media is often over-hyped, but the principles, and numbers behind it, are sound. Getting mentioned is the new link building. It’s about building connections between people. Google has a problem. Using links as a measure of relevant content doesn’t work as well as it used to, so you can be sure Google will be using an ever-more complex set of signals. These signals will involve the connections people make with your site. That’s really what Google wants to know - who is most relevant. Consider the many different ways people can connect with you, and enable those connections.

10. Start reading the blogs/forums/twitter. The irony, of course, is that I’ve linked to some truly great resources and thinkers

If you’ve followed the ten steps above, you’re 80% of the way there. The final 20% will take a while longer, and that’s where the minutae comes in.

Keep in mind that some of the most lucrative SEO information isn’t likely to be published in the public domain. Cultivate personal networks to get this information. This is true of any business endeavor.”

New website for Christchurch company selling steel-frame kitset homes

I’ve just launched a new website for C-Style Homes, a Christchurch company that sells a great range of steel frame kitset homes at amazingly low prices.

This website project is the first of what will be many more as part of a new business relationship I’ve developed with MARKITABLE, a Wellington company.

The website is built with the Joomla open source content management system and has a contemporary look. It’s clean and simple in its design. And furthermore, it is already ranking on page 1 of Google for the keywords steel frame kitset homes due to some pre-launch work on my part ot help get it optimised in the search engines.

The long-term strategy will be to get this site at the top of Google for the term kitset homes, which is much more competitive. I achieved this a few years ago for another website selling kitset homes and I’m confident within a few months C-Style will also be near the top of Google, certainly on Page 1.

Search engine optimisation is very important for any business website, particularly in the current economy. It’s still relatively easy to get a good search engine ranking in the local market in New Zealand, because so few websites are optimised.

That will change, of course, as more busineses get web savvy. But for now, a few simple strategies such as the right meta tags, alt tags on images and developing some good incoming links, is enough to get most sites well ranked on Google in their local market.

Why Search Engine Optimisation Is Doomed … And Quality Content Is The Best Strategy For Your Website

If you have a website, sooner or later you’ll get interested in search engine optimisation.

It’s the art (or is it a science?) of tweaking your website copy and links, so your site ranks higher in the search engines.

There are many professional search engine optimisation firms (commonly known as SEOs) who will charge you substantial amounts of money to improve your website’s rankings for certain search terms.

It’s tempting to go down the SEO track, particularly when you find your precious site languishing far, far down the rankings on Google.

But I would never put my faith in the SEO industry, and I recommend an alternative, more reliable method of achieving a top search engine ranking in the long term.

The truth is, search engines are getting smarter and smarter at recognising sites that have been “SEO’d”.

The engines are constantly getting more sophisticated, to avoid some of the unethical SEO practices being used to trick them into giving a site a good ranking.

So SEO experts are on a continual treadmill to keep up.

Initially, SEO revolved mainly around keywords. Now, it seems to centre around building inbound links to the site, to get a higher ‘page rank’ on Google.

But I believe website owners are wasting their time and money by becoming too focused on either of these SEO techniques.

You’re better off simply adding more and more quality content to your website, to provide visitors with what they really want on the Web.

In other words: Make your content so good that others will want to link to you.

Certainly, bit of a push start by a solid, simple inbound link programme is a good idea but this doesn’t have to become an all-consuming pre-occupation.

All you need are a few popular sites, in your market sector, linking to you.

There are several ways to achieve this, including contacting the owners of sites you would like linking to you, and asking if they want to exchange links.

Once you have a few quality links to your site, that’s enough.

From then on, concentrate on adding more and more content to your site.

There is an important place for keywords on these new content pages. It helps to focus each page on one or two keywords (actually, it’s better to use key phrases, because these are what Web searchers typically use) sprinkle these keywords and phrases throughout your page.

You can find the best keywords by using a service called Wordtracker. This is particularly useful because it saves you from simply guessing which words and phrases people are searching on, and gives you the actual search terms being used  and how much competition there is for these terms.

I won’t go too much into keyword analysis here. Suffice it to say, if you focus mainly on writing content-filled pages that are of genuine value to your prospective customers or clients, you’ll be on the right track.

As the search engines see the content on your site continually changing, they’ll return more often. They’ll spider new content on your pages faster and faster. This is good news and helps your search engine rankings.

The only downside of this approach is that it does take time and commitment to keep adding content to your website. It may seem easier to pay an SEO expert.

But consider this. Even if you do achieve a good ranking in the search engines through SEO, if a visitor arrives and finds mediocre content, what’s the use. They’ll simply click away.

For most small businesses, with limited financial resources, the key to getting your website noticed in the search engines is a slow, steady approach of adding more and more pages with great, relevant content for your marketplace.

Then you can forget about SEO and every other trick.

Focus on building content and everything else will take care of itself.