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SEO

Has Your Website Traffic Taken A Hit

penguin-update

Recently Google introduced a major update called Penguin that caused many websites to experience a big drop in traffic since the update. Any websites that were seen as spammy, over optimised or that were thought to have brought links from blog networks were penalized. In fact, many webmasters received warning messages about this.

Fortunately, we were not among the many websites affected. If anything our website traffic improved and so did the websites of our clients. However, we have heard some horror stories and seen some of the warning messages that some site owners received.

Getting a warning message is a scary thing but it doesn’t have to be a disaster. Be thankful you got a warning. in the past, many website owners have not had this luxury. Having a warning means you can take action and remove any links that Google are finding offensive and recover your position. You can also adopt some strategies to help you reduce your reliance on Google.

Why you should have diverse strategies?

The main thing to understand is that Google will never stop making changes to its algorithm. Every year, it is said that they make over 400 changes. They do this in their quest to provide more relevant results to the searcher.

The issue with the latest update is that some people believe that the changes they made mean that less relevant websites are now appearing in the search results.

Have Google gone too far?

No one can say for certain. No doubt we expect that they will continue to make tweaks to improve the searcher’s experience and ensure more relevant results are displayed. However, be aware that Google will always make changes. Besides the relevance factor, it’s just like KFC’s secret herbs and spices – why would you want people to find out your secret recipe and reverse engineer it and use it to gain an unfair advantage.

You Need Traffic From Multiple Sources

The key thing to understand is that SEO should only be one part of your web marketing strategy. Ideally you want to get traffic from a wide variety of sources. These sources include:

  • Pay per click advertising
  • Social media
  • Email marketing
  • Content marketing
  • Video Marketing

The key is to develop multiple avenues for generating traffic to your website so that your website is not reliant on one source. If you rely solely on Google for traffic, you put yourself at risk.

Spread the Love & The Risk

Think of Google as a business that sells products to Coles or Woolworth’s. If one of the retailers delete your product, then you lose out on 50% of their sales.  If both of them delete it, then you lose 100% of your sales.

The thing is, is that Google has a much bigger slice of the pie than Coles and Woolworth combined.  Google has a massive 92% market share in Australia. They continually change their policies so you might be compliant one day and compliant the next. You can’t afford to put all your eggs in one basket.

You either need to spread your risk or create your own beautiful and unique content that other people love and want to share with others.

If you want to diversify your risk, why not chat to one of our consultants and find out how we can help develop a strategy that works for your company.

Managing Your Online Reputation on Facebook

radio-station-syn

Swoop Digital was contacted prior to Easter to discuss the situation about Ben Polis and managing his online reputation by SYN radio.

For those not familiar with the story, Ben Polis was the founder and CEO of Energy Watch who got into hot water after making several offensive and racist remarks on Facebook. The outcome was that the Melbourne Football Club removed Energy Watch as a sponsor and Ben Polis was forced to step down as CEO of Energy Watch.

This was a media relations disaster for Energy Watch and the Melbourne Football Club – both of whom were left with little option but to take action.

The underlying message for most people is that they need to be mindful about their reputation online and any implications it might have for their career, their business or any deals, such as sponsorships, that are in place.

The interview was between SYN Panorama Executive Producer Joseph Dunstan and our Managing Director Ray Poole.

To supplement this interview we have added a few more tips specifically on how to manage your online reputation on Facebook:

  1. The best advice is don’t make comments that could be construed as racist or discriminatory – remember you are in a public forum and your comments are there for all to see
  2. Set up Google Alerts for your personal name or “brand” so you can get alerts, manage the situation and prepare a response before it becomes too big.
  3. If you are tempted to make offensive comments, make sure you change your Facebook privacy settings are not set to public. Adjust your settings so that only friends or select people can see your comments.
  4. When updating your status on Facebook, use the drop down arrow next to the post button and select custom – you should then be able to control who you send your message to. However the main thing to realize that even friendships fall out – so in a public arena sometimes you are just better off saying nothing at all.
  5. Check your public timeline regularly and remove any posts that you think might later cause you some regret.

How to Get Listed For Local Search

If you are a local business, getting your business found and set up properly is essential. There are three components to this.

These include:

  1. Off Site / Off places
  2. Google My Business Listing
  3. Website

One critical thing to keep in mind when doing local SEO is that you must have consistent contact information at every touchpoint on the web. This is called NAP (Business Name, Address and Phone Number).

The reason why you want this is because search engines aggregate data from multiple sources that relate back to your business profile on the web. If you do it right the first time, you will save yourself a lot of time and heartache from having to go back and do it again. It is very frustrating to go back and change things later on.

Here are some tips for your NAP

  • Get your NAP (name, address and postcode) and telephone numbers everywhere before you do your page.
  • Use a company email address with the business domain name e.g. www.yourdomain.com
  • If you have a home based business and do not want to show your address, consider using a service like http://www.mbe.com.au which gives you a physical address
  • Use a company email address – not an employee email address because you never know if they will move on
  • Fill in as much information as you can as this will help your listing rank
  • Use your official business name and do not add keywords to your name – you will be punished if you get caught!
  • Make sure sure the information you put in is consistent.

The next step is to get citations (mentions of your business name, address, phone number and web address) from off-site around the web before you claim your listing.

Off Site / Off Places

  • Citations
  • Inbound Links to Website (and internal links)
    • Make sure your website has links from other trusted websites
    • Ensure your website has links from other trusted websites in your area (city level)
    • Make sure the links (anchor text) is targeting the proper keyword terms (anchor text) that you want your business to be associated with
    • Establish partnerships/relationships with other industry related websites where you can obtain a link from
    • Have internal links within you website  – use rich anchor text that represents your products and services. Include location in your anchor text links.
    • Have a blog – This will enable you to add content to your site. The benefits of a blog are: quicker indexation, more pages to target more keywords and creating trust with customers.
    • Add link from your social media accounts to your website. Some social media sites includes:
      • Facebook Page
      • Twitter
      • Google+ Business Page
      • LinkedIn
      • Flickr
      • YouTube
      • Foursquare
    • Include social sharing icons on your site so your customers can easily share your pages and content over social networks
    • Bookmark, link build, & retweet your citations to distribute content – This has proved to be an effective way to get content on high PR, trusted sites.
    • You can use tools like Google Webmaster Tools or SEOmoz Open Site Explorer to keep an eye on how many links the website receives over time.

Google My Business

Once you have listings off-site around the web, you should start to complete your Google My Business listing. Here are some tips to help you get started.

  • Use your actual Business Name: Make sure you don’t stuff keywords in the title.
  • Physical Address: Make sure you added your physical address to your Places account – PO Boxes are not allowed.
  • Manually Verified Place Page
    • Manually claim and verify your business listing in Google Places
    • If you see your business already there on Google Maps, make sure you claim the listing.
    • Note: Google only allows you to register one listing per account. Choose your account wisely.
  • Categories: Add in the categories that describe the products and services that your company offers. If not, review your categories to ensure your business is placed under the right section.
  • Area Code/Telephone
    • Ideally you should use a local area code telephone number for your business.
    • Use a different telephone number if you have multiple locations – do not use a 13 number which diverts to the local location if you want all your offices listed. You should also use an area code specific telephone number for that listing.
    • Never use a 1-800 number in Google Places.
  • Photos: add as many as you can (you can have up to 10)
    • Geotag your pictures and name the pictures with your keywords that you want to rank for in Google.
    • To geotag Open an account at Flickr. Label your photos as [category keyword,town] & [town,category keyword], and use the geo-coding capabilities. Otherwise use a tool like Exif Tool out this Guide to Geotagging Images for Local Seo on Search Engine Land.
  • Video: Add video (you can have up to 5 videos)
    • Geo-tag your video’s and add your business name, address & phone number to the description of each video.
  • Additional Details: Add in the the Additional Details section – eg. do a short sentences which contains your keywords or use this section to link to the page that also has these reviews.
  • Offers: Use the offers page to add coupons that people can use or view on their mobile.
  • Reviews:  Get Reviews – this is going to critical in the future.
    • Ask your clients / customers to add their review of your business on your Google Places page or even other sites where your business is listed.
    • Let your customers know you are on other review sites like Yelp.com by displaying a sign/sticker on your store front.

Your Website

Finally, you also want to make sure that your website is also optimized for local search.

  • On Page SEO (search engine optimization)
    • Make sure your homepage is optimized for
      • <title>
      • <meta description>
      • <H1>
      • Body text
      • ALT text
    • Make your pages have specific local + keyword targeting – If you are a Estate Planning Lawyer in Melbourne, you’ll want ‘Melbourne’ along with your practice in all these areas.
    • Have a landing page for each location if your business has more than one location. For example, it is recommended that you have a different landing page for each city that your business is in. This increases the opportunity to target towns/suburbs that you may not be targeting if you were in a larger city.
    • See if your NAP information marked up using Microdata (Schema.org)
  • Contact Us Pages
    • Make sure you have included;
      • Business hours;
      • Directions to your store;
      • Menu if you are a restaurant; and,
      • A map locating your physical location (you can get your map from Google Maps.
  • KML File
    • Make sure you have a KML file specifying your location and coordinates (latitude and longitude) in the root directory of your site? (i.e. www.yourdomain.com/locations.kml)
    • Use a tool to help you create your Geositemap and KML files: http://www.geositemapgenerator.com/).
  • Geo Sitemap. Note : As March the Geositemap is no longer required and will report a warning message if you upload it.
    • Create and upload a geo sitemap to the root directory of your site.
    • Make sure your geo sitemap references your KML file.
    • Specify your geo sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools.  
  • Mobile Site
    • Make sure your site is optimized for mobile.
    • Ensure that your contact information, including phone, directions and a map, is presented in a clean manner on mobile devices.
  • Content
    • Make sure you have content about your products and services.
    • Ensure your pages are optimized for your researched keywords + location.
    • Write and provide helpful resources that make you sound credible and trustworthy to your customers.

We recommend reading the official Google Places Guidelines as well as checking out GetListed.

How to Get Off Page One of Google

google-screenshot

Most people ask us for help to get onto page one, position one on Google. However, sometimes we have people ask the complete opposite.

Normally, this is because there is negative information about them that they would keep private. Most times the situation can occur through no fault of their own. It just happens. Sometimes they made an enemy.

Getting off page one of Google can be more challenging then getting to page one.

The reason for this is because, normally when you aim to get on page one, there is usually one critical keyword that you want to rank for. So part of the strategy is to build contextual links for that keyword and ensure that they point to the relevant page on the website.

However, when you want to remove something (or at least bury it) you need to send links to multiple locations. This means that instead of getting one property to rank, you are trying to get multiple properties to rank for a keyword.

Sending links to multiple properties can mean that instead of focusing on building links to one property, you need to focus the same amount of effort on multiple properties. This means managing your reputation on the web can definitely be more expensive than just focusing on building links to one place.

What can be really frustrating is that you get one property to rank above the offending property but instead of expecting the offending property to push down, what happens is that other pages that were ranked above it get pushed down.

So moving a page above another does not necessarily mean that the page you want to be pushed down gets pushed down.

It is quite an interesting dance

So a little dance occurs. For example, suppose the offensive article was on page one, position 9. You buy a keyword-rich domain and get it to rank on page one position three within hours. Most people would expect that the article that was in position ten would disappear right? Wrong?

What can happen is that something in position seven or even eight could move to the second page leaving the offensive article in the same position.

So how to Get off page one of Google

  1. Check the page titles of your existing website and see if any page titles can be changed
  2. Buy a keyword rich domain name, build out a website and fill it with content
  3. Create a video and upload to You Tube ensuring that the title is keyword optimized
  4. Create PDFs and upload them to a resources section of your website. Google gobble up PDFs.
  5. Build backlinks to multiple properties that you own (e.g. secondary pages on your website) and your social media profiles
  6. Try and send links to other properties that sit below the offensive material
  7. Use keyword rich and relevant anchor text for your links
  8. Use local directory listings
  9. Avoid sending links to pages that are potentially at risk of being banned or removed is a waste of time

Tips to Get Ahead in the Era of Social Search

The recent launch of Google+ has heralded a fundamental change to the way search engine optimisation will work in the future. Search engine optimisation is no longer just about getting a wide variety of links with a mixture of high authority links thrown in.

This game changer has led some people to believe that is  SEO dead.

The fact is SEO is going to become more challenging than ever. SEO has now entered the era of social search.

What this means is that search engine optimisation is about to become a lot more social. Google will now start to blend social signals and high authority websites in their search results.

In doing this, Google will be able to provide a tailored set of search results to every user. This means there is no guarantee your business will be on page 1 and position 1 of Google.

Your position will also depend on who has shared your content within your social circle (or other people’s social circles). You can see an example of this below. My face appears on position 3 of Google as does Mike Rhodes who is a friend of ours.

search-results

Its no longer a matter of how high you rank, but how far your rank extends.

How you can get ahead

  1. Content is king. Your goal is to create content, and share it with your market. You need to be where they are. Nothing less.
  2. Your content must be good enough to be shared with others.  This is because in the future it isn’t going to matter just about how many links you get to your content, it will also matter how many recommendations your business gets (in the form of +1’s from your friends) from other people.
  3. Your content needs to be able to deliver what your market wants. Think about your most frequently asked questions – maybe writing about them and sharing this content is a good way to start.  Some people are fascinated with stats. Does your market like stats? Have you got some interesting market research to share? Are there any complex issues related to your business that you could write about.
  4. Monitor your Google Analytics and find out what search terms people tend to be more interested in. Repeat more of what is working and see if you can get more mileage from it.
  5. If you don’t have access to your analytics account, insist that you get access. I was once told by an agency when I worked on the client side that it was not possible. This is completely false. Google Analytics allows you to give access to multiple people. You should have access to such a rich data source – it is after all your asset.
  6. Get verified as an author. Yes it is slightly technical and involves your web design company putting some code on your website. But what it means is that you as the author will appear in other peoples search results. If people who know you see your face, they are more likely to click on the result with your face on it then they are if a business is ranked in position #2 or even #3.

If you aren’t sure about author rank and what is all means, Google has put out a video explaining it.

What is Google My Business

Google opened the doors to Google+ for Business but replaced it with Google My Business. This post has been rewritten to discuss what is a Google My Business listing is.

A Google My Business Page is a free tool offered by Google to help business manage their online profile on Google even if they do not have a website.

You can add key business information such as your name, address (or service areas), phone number, opening hours and services. If you have a website, you can also include that as well.

Your listing appears in the local results of Google search as well as in Google maps.

Why have a Google My Business listing

A Google Business listing will help your business get found by people looking for the products are services you offer. You can add photos of your business.

A listing also enables customers to write reviews about your business as well as upload photos, ask questions and set up direct messaging.

You can also publish posts to your listing. This is helpful if you are running promotions or want to give potential customers some tips.

It also provides an opportunity for you to respond to customer reviews.

Why have a Google My Business Page

A Google My Business listing helps support local SEO.

It’s an easy way to get found on the web, particularly if your business serves locals. You can use keywords to help your profile be found.

Therefore we suggest incorporating relevant keywords into your Business Profile so you can tell Google what you want to be found for. Try and use those keywords in the “from your business” description, in the posts you publish and in your responses to reviews.

Having a well-maintained presence will help build trust with your potential customers.Good reviews will help you build trust with people who are unfamiliar with your business.

Use Business Reviews To Build Trust

A key part of your strategy should be to ask customers to review you on Google. While most people won’t write a review many people will. For the most part, these are positive but sometimes you may get a negative review.

Reviews are not something you should not shy away from or be fearful of. They can be a good thing and help you improve your processes and customer service.

Even if you have a bad review, you can respond to it and the way you respond is just as important as the review itself. People also read owner responses to reviews – particularly if they are negative and it can be easy to discern if your reviewer is being unreasonable.

Canonicalization: What Is it? How Does it Impact Me?

We recently had someone make contact with us who wanted us to do a website review on their site. Unfortunately, they had an issue called canonicalization where search engine saw their website as being 4 different sites!

What Does Canonicalization Mean?

Canonicalization means that search engines see multiple versions of your website. The most common is that a search engine will see two versions of your website. For example:

  • http://www.yourdomain.com.au
  • http://yourdomain.com.au

It may not seem like much of a problem but this is not great for several reasons.

Having different versions of your site means you lose link authority if someone links to your site. Imagine you had three visitors come to your website and link to it.

Visitor 1 links to your site as http://yourdomain.com.au. Visitor 2 links to your site as http://www.yourdomain.com.au and visitor 3 links as http://www.yourdomain.com.au/index.html.

What it means is that when the Google spiders start crawling on these links, they see them as three different pages. Each link is like a vote so each “different page” gets one vote.

The more votes your page gets, the more authority it has. Having these votes split into different pages means that your authority is diluted. Your website would be in a much stronger position if it had 3 votes to the one page instead of 1 vote to each page. This of course is amplified the more links you get to your website.

Duplicate Content

Having the same content on multiple pages also makes it look like you have the same content on your website. Some argue that this is not great from a search engine perspective because it can mislead search engines by making them believe them believe that you are stealing someone else’s content when it actually your own! Some believe you could be penalized for this.

Personally, I think search engines are smart enough to tell the difference if it is coming from the same URL, however one could argue that a non-www version of your site and a www version of your site is different URL. If getting to page 1 of Google is your objective, I would play it safe and just get the issue fixed.

You can set your preferred domain in Webmaster Tools or ask your friendly website designer to help resolve the issue at the server level. Either way, there is a simple fix.

This is a Common Issue

We recently attended a networking breakfast in Brighton and grabbed the business cards of 24 members. A quick look through Google to do a canonicalization analysis on the group members and I discovered that 65% of the websites from that group had an issue with canonicalization. Only 15% didn’t have this issue. The rest either didn’t have a website or their website was down.

How to Get Your Site Indexed Quickly by Google

dog-fetching

Many sites we see are not indexed in Google. This means that they will never be found in a search engine unless someone types the websites exact address in their browser to see their site. Fortunately, there are several ways you can get your site indexed quickly by Google.

The latest way is to use Google’s Fetch.  This new tool allows webmasters (and owners) to submit their site to Google so that it is indexed in Google. You can check out Google’s Webmaster Central blog for instructions on how to use the tool and get your website indexed quickly. I believe this is something that will now become standard procedure for many SEO companies.

How to Find Out If Your Site is Indexed

So how do you know if your site is indexed in Google? Simple. The main thing is to go to your Google Search page and then type in:

site:yourdomain.com.au.

If you can see your pages on the search page then you know that you do not need to use the “Fetch as Googlebot” feature. If you can’t see your pages, then you should use this nifty tool.

What About Other Search Engines

Now, this feature only works with Google but if you want to make sure your site is indexed in other search engines, you have several options. A couple of these is to submit your website URL site to a service like www.pingler.com or www.pingoat.com.

Of course, if you use a blogging platform like WordPress you may not need to do this as new blog posts are pinged automatically.

Alternatively, you can list your site on a listing site like www.hotfrog.com.au or www.truelocal.com.au. Search engines tend to crawl high authority local directory listing sites regularly so chances are that your site will be indexed pretty quickly.

Google Panda Update Signals Content Is King

What’s All The Fuss About?

Google recently did a major update, better known as Google Panda, to the way they rank pages.

I remember sitting at a conference pondering the implications with some high profile Internet Marketers and SEO Consultants at the time. The intent of the Google Panda update was to downgrade sites that were deemed to be low quality.

The kind of sites we are talking about here are content farm sites that rank high in the search engines such as ehow or wikiHow.

The reason for the change was due to the concern that Google’s search engine listings were being degraded with poor quality content. This makes sense. Google had to respond and the shakeup was bound to happen.

It was a big shakeup with an estimated 12% of sites affected. However, this is not the end of the changes. Not by a long shot. It was only one of about 500 algorithm changes planned over the next year.

What Does Google Want?

If you think about Google – they are all about providing good quality relevant content.  As searchers using Google, we have also been conditioned to expect and find answers for what we are searching for instantly. If we are not getting the right answers instantly, then Google will respond.

Just recently Amit Singhal the head of Google search made a statement regarding the update. To this end, he listed a number of questions that webmasters should ask themselves about the quality of content on their site.

Some of the questions stated were:

Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?

We’ve all been to web pages where we have found lots of information on topics that actually offer very little helpful or insightful information.

The key here is to think about your reader. Make sure you are writing about a topic that you know about and that you are providing value.

Many people worry that if they give all their secrets away, then they will lose business but this will actually help you build authority and credibility in your market.

Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?”

This is very fascinating. What you need to be careful of here is targeting keywords that are very similar on your website. For example, if one of your pages has a keyword-targeted at the term “online bank” and another one is targeted at the term “online banking” then you would be in trouble with Google, as they see this as low value as the content on these two pages will be virtually the same stuff.

If you do want to target more than one keyword, you are better to target them on the same page.

So my tip is to use related keywords on one page rather than several pages on your site. Once you have done that, then the next step is to get backlinks for the different phrases and make sure the backlinks link to the right pages where the keyphrase is.

Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?”

This is a serious question for me and probably for many people. I am an excellent speller but a bad typist. I leave words out and even mistype them. Usually, I am good enough to pick up the errors but small ones do get through from time to time.

Our awesome Editor will attest to this (though he hasn’t read this post yet). What it means is that my days of speed reading are numbered.

According to Google, this may mean that I am about to become penalized.  The implications of this are I will kill a few more trees by printing my articles out and reading them but my article will be of better quality (I am better at proofreading from a piece of paper than on a computer screen).

Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?  How much quality control is done on content? Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?”

Google has a fondness for brands because they represent authority which is important in Google’s eyes.

Brands usually have a lot more resources at their disposal which means the content is often checked and edited by several people within an organisation.

Google is rewarding organisations for this behaviour. Smaller businesses need to be careful and consider using proofreaders to check and edit any content before they put it on their website.

Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?”

How many times have you visited a site only to find more ads on the page than content?

Too many ads on a page is not a good thing and Google are going to penalize sites for this if they deem there are too many ads on the page.

How this is measured will be anyone’s guess but perhaps a large number of external links on a page coupled with a high bounce rate might provide a clue.

Would you trust the information presented in this article?  Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site? Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?”

This statement is very interesting. You may have noticed that your friends faces are now popping up in search results. Your friends or the people within your social network are now influencing what appears in the search results.  This is an attempt to integrate search and social media.

It is an interesting move because Google has also recently launched the Google Plus 1 button which Google have said they will use as a ranking indicator in the search results. The Google Plus 1 button is essentially an “I don’t like button.”  There are lots of reasons why this is not a good thing (this deserves a whole new post).

However, the upshot is that Google (and other search engines) are starting to rely on, and will become more reliant on social media and the recommendations of others to influence search engine rankings.

Mr Singhal added a lot more questions. You can check them out in the Google Webmasters post. It is worth checking them out. However, the key takeout is to create high-quality content that matters. Make sure your content is well written and that it includes some original ideas.

Follow some simple guidelines and make sure you don’t have excessive spelling mistakes and poor grammar. Make your pages engaging by using headers and adding images and video.  Have content that is well written and is not just rehashed info from all the other sites ranking for that keyword. You can still curate content but give your opinion and demonstrate market leadership.

How To Search Engine Optimise Your Website

If you are writing blog posts on your website but not optimising your posts for search engines, you could be missing out on a big opportunity to bring more visitors to your site.

Writing blogs that are optimised for search engines is not as simple as thinking about a topic and writing about it. There is nothing wrong with doing this of course (and I have been guilty of it), but if you are going to take the time to write a blog post, you might as well leverage what your are writing so that it is optimised for search engines which means it is more likely to be found by people searching the web.

More eyeballs on your site = more potential customers or sales. It will also help grow your authority on a given topic.

Writing content is a form of currency that is crucial to any business’s online marketing. More people are now searching online for answers so ranking in the search engines for what people are searching for is critical. The key is to be strategic in your approach using SEO tactics.

So here are some tips to get you started:

Find an interesting subject and offer your unique point of view

A good way to do this is to skim the news and see if there is any news relevant to your industry. If there is, why not write about it and offer your point of view. Sometimes things happen in other industries that you can relate to within your own. Consider writing about it. Another idea is to think about all the questions people ask you on a daily basis. Perhaps this is also a topic of interest worthy of writing about.

Conduct keyword research

Once you found a topic worthy of writing about, you need to conduct keyword research. This is a way of sense checking that people are actually searching for what you are planning to write about. You need to make sure that there are enough people searching for that keyword to make it worth your while. You also need to check that the keyword is not too competitive.

Also, make sure that what you are writing about is related to the products or services that you offer. Consider if the keywords you have chosen are keywords related to research or purchase intent. It’s ok to use either, but if they are doing research, build in a mechanism where you can capture a name or email address so you can try and build a relationship with them before they are ready to buy.

Pick your keywords

Select just one keyword for each post and vary the keyword with two or three variations of that keyword.  You don’t want to spam your page and you still need to make it easy for other people to read. For example, if “car mats” was your main keyword vary the keyword to use other terms such as “Holden Car Mats,” “Rubber Car Mats,” or “Car Mats Rubber.”

Optimise the Blog Post

Once you have selected your keywords, you need to ensure that they are contained within your blog post. Specifically, the keyword should be in the URL, page title, description as well as in any headings. Your images should also be optimized for the keyword.

Use Anchor Text

Link one of those keywords to another related page on your website. Ideally, the link should go to a related page that has a strong call to action e.g. buy genuine car mats.

Share the content across social networks

The next step is to share your post across social media networks. These include mediums such as Facebook, Twitter or even LinkedIn if appropriate. Search engines are now paying a lot more attention to social networks and we will soon find that content that is shared across the web will rank strongly in the search engines. Use the keywords that you are targeting when you share the content. If you have a WordPress blog, you can use social plugins like FBLike, LinkedIn Share, TweetMeMe, Sexy Bookmarks, or the AddThis buttons.

You can also use the Facebook comments plugin to help increase user interaction with your content. Ensure your blog has an RSS Feed so people can read your content even if they are not visiting your website directly.

Find links

Getting links to your website is critical to help boost your site in search engine rankings. How many links do you need? The answer is not so straight forward but you need higher quality links than your competitors who are ranking above you. There are some free and paid tools that can help you find links.

Track the performance

Monitor your blog post and website in terms of how it ranks for the keywords you selected. Does it appear on page one? If not, what page does it appear on? Check your Google Analytics as well for what keywords are driving people to your site. If you check your progress, you will see what posts are working and which ones are not working so well with your readers.  Repeat the tactics that worked. You can always strengthen your blog with more keywords.

As you can see SEO is a gradual process that can be time-consuming. Setting aside a small amount of time each week will mean that you will make progress over a period of time. The length of time will depend on how competitive your market is.

There is an art to selecting the right keywords for search. It is worth investing in the services of an SEO professional to assist you in keyword selection, SEO Copywriting and Linkbuilding. Swoop Digital can help search engines optimise your website with our comprehensive SEO Services.