Matt Powers, website designer

There are two main components to SEO: how well optimized is your own website and how many sites link back to you. The latter component relies heavily on the quality of your content, marketing, and social media connections. All of those things take time to develop, and are often beyond your direct control. I’ll discuss what you should be doing on your own website, to make sure the search engines are getting the information they need.

Keywords

Before you do any SEO, you need to figure out what your keywords and terms are. Be specific. Depending on the size of your site, you may only want 3-5 terms. A good place to start would be a list of no more than 10 terms. When choosing your keywords, make sure they are fairly specific, not vague. The main question to answer is “what would someone enter in a search engine if they wanted to find my site?” If you sell clothes, you don’t want to choose “clothing” as a keyword. Instead, choose something like “Nike Jerseys” or even target specific clothing lines. Targeting a particular region can also be beneficial (“addidas shoes richmond”).

Repetition

Now that you’ve got your keywords, you need to use those on your site. Your content needs to be readable and seem natural, but you’ll want to incorporate those phrases where they fit. Search engines look at what is repeated on a page. Think of a magazine article. The title is going to appear in multiple places, and should include the most important part of the story. Try to structure your pages like this. Whatever is repeated in titles, headlines, and paragraphs is adding relevance to your page.

Text, text, text

Although there is limited support through other means, SEO is really all about text. Re-read your content. Does it say what it should? Are your terms there? If your site consists of images that contain writing instead of selectable text, it’s safe to say that your site needs help.

Linking

Links are an extremely important part of SEO. You certainly want external sites to link back to you, but you also need to make use of internal links (link your pages to each other). If your site is about organic gardening tips, and you have a section on how to grow tomatoes, you should link the phrase “How to grow tomatoes” to the relevant page or article.

Fresh content

Update your site regularly and post new content. This is great for search engines as well as your visitors. People love to get something for free, and it gives you an opportunity to convey your own expertise. Blogs are excellent for this since they provide an easy way to create new content. They also have built in tagging systems, so you can begin incorporating your SEO keywords with a few clicks of a mouse.

For a more in depth look at your own site, contact me.