How To Get SEO Right From The Very Start
We have recently signed up new clients—yes!—they are businesses doing SEO for the first time. The leap they made into the “unknown” is what we treasure. We told them that from today until 3-5 months after, they will not hear much from us as we focus on the hard work in the background.
Trust is very important to us and trust is hard to earn especially when the results are not instant. But what we think make our clients trust us in the selling phase—them taking our word for it–is that our SEO.SIMPLE.™ and content-driven SEO packages make perfect sense. SEO is among many marketing strategies—and a very profitable one at that—available to businesses. We think that regardless of the lack of familiarity with a marketing strategy, if the marketing principle is right, people can come to an agreement that the particular strategy works.
So how do we do SEO? If you are planning to try to do it yourself, how do you get SEO right the first time? Here are techniques we have proven to work for us and our clients:
Getting SEO Right: Laying A Rock-Solid Foundation
We have had some clients come to us after months of futile work with another SEO vendor only to find out that their site is not even structured to be ready for SEO. What a waste that is! Preparation is key, and here are ways you should do it:
Keyword Research. Fundamentally, you have to have a familiarity with your market and know what exactly they put into Google to find you. But then, if you only limit your search keywords with these, then you will end up with very competitive keywords which will take a longer time to rank for especially if your competitor has been doing SEO and has been in the top position for far longer time. Non competitive keywords will help drive the initial traffic to your site. Taking milk before meat is the way to go.
Buying Keyword-Rich Domain. Getting your main keywords into your domain name increases your clickthrough rate. Search engine spiders favor this.
Hosting Domain For Five Years Or More. This is not even an SEO work but a great SEO tip. Google favors domains which are stable, so hosting a domain for 5, 10 years or more tells Google that you are a stable company. This makes Google feel safe to index you on the top pages as you will exist and become searchable to many users for the long time.
Correct URL Structures. We have done this “cleaning up” for many of our clients. Getting the correct URL structures is important from the very start, because you should not change the URL structures when you start receiving backlinks. So the right structure will look something like www.yourdomain.com/productcategory/productname.html instead of www.yourdomain.com/productid=1558.html
Creating The Right Number Of Keyword-Specific Pages. Some clients do not even have the right number of pages which Google will consider indexing. We recommend creating individual pages for the major products you’re selling and naming these pages after the products. When your users search for “empire cut wedding gowns” they will land the page where this is being offered; instead of just landing the home page where “wedding gowns” and everything else exist. More keyword-specific pages are better for you. It gives Google an indication that you are a specialist in this product.
Getting SEO Right: Creating Content The Right Way
After the initial groundwork, you are now ready to do SEO in terms of producing high quality content with just the right keyword density. Be aware that Google does not like keyword spamming.
Keyword Placement. Place keywords both on the copy that appears on the site and on the HTML meta data that is on the backend CMS or content management system. We use WordPress CMS for all our clients. On the backend, the keywords should be placed on the title tag, the header tag, and the meta description. As per the copy, the keyword should appear no more than 5 times over a 320-word copy, on the title, beginning, middle, and ending paragraphs.
Keep Keyphrases Short And Simple. Avoid confusing the search engine spiders and your human visitors. If it’s just “empire cut wedding gown” you are offering on a page, then make sure to use only this keyphrase and not add ‘sequined, full skirt, sleeveless’ and other phrases. Create a separate page for these should you desire to use these phrases.
Internal Links. Google likes to see that your site is busy. So don’t put everything into your home page. Create several pages, and link these pages to each other. Create blog posts and link the post to particular pages on your site.
XML Site Map. Write an XML sitemap, which is basically a text document that outlines exactly where all the pages on your site are, and how users navigate them. It shows all of the separate pages and how they’re linked, and helps search engines to index the site.
WordPress and most other CMS have plugins that can generate sitemaps for you and submit them to Google. Alternatively, you can have one generated at XML-sitemaps.com and submit it to directly to Google.
