SEO Tips to Create and Manage Your Own Campaign

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is "The process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion." (*1) The holy grail of SEO is the first page of search engine results but as more and more companies recognise the importance of a high ranking it has become harder and harder achieve this.

This blog has been designed to give you some SEO tips that will allow you to create and manage your own campaign. SEO is becoming a very important element of any company's marketing strategy and learning how to manage it in-house can save you considerable amounts of money and yet still deliver some promising results.

What's SEO Made Up Of?

SEO is made up of a number of factors. Some of these you may need professional help with but if you have an easy to use content management system (CMS), you can even implement yourself. The main components are:
1.    SEO Tags and Meta information - these are the terms that you use to tell the search engines what your page contains.
2.    Page Rank - used by Google, this measures the number of links to your site and the popularity and content of those sites. In short Google uses a link to your site as a vote of popularity.
3.    Content and keyword density - the amount of keywords used in the copy of a page will further increase your chances of showing for this search request.
4.    Search engine friendly web design - this refers to the development and structure of your site implemented by your web developer.
Despite what all the SEO companies will tell you, performing standard level SEO work on your site is not rocket science and with the following SEO tips we hope that you can achieve some level of cut through and promote the popularity of your website.

What are SEO Tags and Meta Information?

Meta tags are used to communicate the information of a page's content to the search engines. For a long time the implementation of these tags has been limited to specialists that have programing knowledge, but this is not the case today and with an advanced CMS system you can easily add these tags to a page or content level. The hardest aspect of the addition of the SEO tags is now understanding what content should be entered.

So what are these tags exactly?

Title Tags:
Title tags highlight to the search engines the name of the page and the content that it represents – it is located in the top left hand corner of a browser. There is a limit to the amount of words that the search engines will read and we suggest that between 8 - 12 words is best practice.
Meta Description Tags:
This is a short description of the page's content and is limited to around 250 characters. This is the text that is displayed on the search results page and can highly influence the click through rate that your pages receive from being shown on a results page.
Meta Keyword Tags:
Key words are used to reinforce your page's content. These should be limited to 500 characters and should be closely linked to the keywords that appear throughout the copy of the page.

Tips for Selecting Keywords

Long Tail Keywords vs Short Tail

When you look at creating a key word strategy for your website you need to look at Long Tail keywords vs Short Tail. A Long Tail Keyword refers to a more detailed request being entered into a search engine such as "Car insurance North Sydney" where as a Short Tail has less specific detail such as "Insurance".

When looking at the two it is important to consider that although a Short Tail keyword will have far greater traffic, a long tail keyword will return a more relevant result to a user and will lead to greater conversions. They are also considerably less competitive and will lead to quicker returns on you SEO investment.

How Do I Learn What People are Searching For?

One of the most powerful tools used through the SEO industry is the Google Keyword tool. This allows you to look into the level of search volumes around different keywords.

Enter the keywords that you are considering using for your SEO campaign and assess that the level of traffic is sufficient. It is important to note that the most popular "short tail" keywords are always the most competitive, and you will require a sophisticated SEO strategy to achieve results.

Tips For Writing Keyword Specific Content?

Creating content is one of the most important aspects of an SEO campaign but also one of the most demanding and time consuming. Not only does the content need to appeal to your visitors, but it must also communicate effectively with the search engine spiders that crawl your site. One of the biggest mistakes that we see is businesses leaving copy writing to the last moment of the project. You need to give yourself time and spread the task throughout you organisation to ensure timelessness and quality.

Writing Quality SEO Copy;

- Create a specific content focus point for each page.
- Attach ALT tags for all images throughout the site.
- Use your keyword in the title and set it as the Paragraph 1 - this will create an H1 tag.
- Use bold and/or italics with your keywords to make them stand out.
- Get a good mix of keywords to content. This should be between 2.5% to 4%.
Selecting Your keywords, Implementing and Tracking Your Campaign
Now that you have an idea of what the market is looking for, have selected keywords and absorbed all of our SEO tips, it's time to:

    1. Enter the SEO tags and meta information for the site.
    2. Create your keyword specific copy.
    3. Setup your analytics to track campaign.

When entering your SEO tags and meta information be sure to use a CMS that will inherit information from parent pages. This will allow you to enter the main site tags and then progress through the site when you have the time available. Ensure that each page on your site has keyword specific copy and is closely tied to the meta information. Finally, tracking the success of the campaign is the most important aspect of all so make sure that your analytics code is set up to give you the level of information that you require to assess the campaign and make changes where necessary.

SEO Tips Conclusion

Online is a very important part of any marketing strategy and it is important you have a finely tuned SEO strategy that will ensure that your site is seen and works to its full potential. If you are looking at implementing your own SEO campaign make sure that you select a CMS and Website Design agency that will give you all the tools you need to achieve success.


(*1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization