A focus on natural search (beginner's guide to SEO)

Creating Relevant Content

We're starting with content because really, content is the most important part of your website. Any value that it adds needs to be added through good, relevant content.

We do this by identifying the key phrases to target:

Keyword research tools allow you to get an indication of the popularity of various search terms. Additionally, you also need to check the level of competition for those terms. Armed with this information, you can now put together a comprehensive keyword strategy for your SEO campaign.

Various aspects of keyword research:

1) Search volume - This is an indication of the popularity of a search term.

Some useful Keyword tools include:

There are lots out there. Give a couple of them a try and decide which ones you like.

A high-ranking on a popular term can deliver a lot of traffic but popular terms are also likely to be more competitive.

2) Competitiveness - For very competitive terms, where there are many websites vying for a rank, a strategic decision needs to be made regarding whether or not to target that term.

More competitive terms are usually set aside as part of a longer term SEO strategy, with the less competitive terms being favoured in the short to medium term. An SEO strategist needs to make these decisions based on the ratio of searches to competitors and decide on its viability considering that particular term's propensity to convert.

3) Propensity to convert - Conversion remains the ultimate goal of any website. We want our users to take a certain course of action. When selecting key phrases to target, it is important to consider the likelihood of those terms leading to a conversion. To what extent does the search term give us an insight into the mind of the searcher? At what stage of the buying cycle are they currently?

By creating a bias towards phrases with a high conversion rate, we maximise the ratio of visitors to customers. With your keyword strategy in place, you now know what kind of content your site needs.

Some important points about content:

Use your content to create an obvious site theme.
For more competitive search terms, you'll need to create a hierarchical structure of supporting content, again reinforcing the theme.
The better the quality of your content, the more leverage it will afford you for later on in the process.
Remember, conversion is your website's ultimate goal.

On Page Indicators of Relevance

Meta Data

Meta Keywords - Meta keywords were, a long time ago, pretty much the BIG thing in SEO. These days the Meta Data are far more peripheral in their importance. Primarily they act as an indicator of a webpage's theme. Keep them relevant to the content on your page.
Meta Description - Many Search Engines use the meta description paragraph as the descriptive snippet below your page link on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Bearing that in mind, these few lines of copy are perhaps among the most important of your page. The more compelling, the more likely you are to get a good click through rate (CTR). Ultimately, this has positive repercussions for your rankings and traffic stats.

Title Tags

Title Tags are the primary indicator of what you web page is about. They are also important since they are displayed above your page description on the Search Engine Results Pages.

Header Tags

Header tags like <h1>, <h2> and <h3> are used to create a hierarchical page structure and act as an indicator of page theme. You should be using these to structure your page and use keywords to indicate relevance to your chosen target phrase for that page.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is a measure of how many times your key phrase occurs on your page in relation to the total number of words. The key here is to keep it reasonable. Keyword density is an indicator of relevance of your content to the targeted phrase. There's no magic percentage figure, but if you read the copy and if sounds overdone, then you need to reduce your keyword density.

Bolding/Strong and Italics/Emphasis

Bolding and italics serve a primary purpose as a means to indicate bits of text that should be emphasised. In web copy, which is usually rapidly skimmed by users, bolding and, or italics make copy easier to read and understand. Additionally, they act as an indicator of relevance for specific terms. So using these techniques helps both users and Search Engines, which should always be your aim.

Alt Tags for Images

Search Engine spiders can't read images. So to help them along, we use alt tags to describe the images. With images that are relevant to the key phrase, we help improve relevance of our page when alt tags are used properly.

Bullets

Bullet points make it easy to convey your point quickly and concisely. This makes it convenient for your reader, looking to scan and get the gist of your content. If it's good for your users, it's probably good for your rankings and that's the case in this instance. Use bullet points for the layout of your content to make it clear what the theme of your page is.

OK, so now the site has some great, original, relevant content. The theme of your pages is clear. I guess it's just a case of sit back and wait for the traffic, right?

I'm afraid not.

The next most important step is to make sure that your great content gets found because even the best content is of no value if it can't be found.

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