Background

The National Training Centre (NTC, www.ntc.ie) comprises five schools and colleges, providing training in the areas of health related fitness, orthopaedic sports massage, neuromuscular and physical therapy, as well as pilates and osteopathy.

Having invested into their website redesign recently, they understood very well that in order to succeed online, they need to rank at the top of the search engines.

Therefore they wished to obtain top positions for a wide variety of keywords relevant to the training courses they provide. How did they find the company to help them with this task?

“When the National Training Centre decided to seek out SEO services, the process was very simple. Open a browser and search Google for Search Engine Optimisation in Ireland. Whoever appears top of the list obviously knows what they are doing. 3R were top of the search results so it was a no brainer to go with them,” said Greg Merriman, the Chief Administrative Officer of NTC.

Methodology

“At the beginning of every SEO job, the first thing we look at is the website itself and whether they are effectively communicating the value they offer to their customers,” said Simona Rusnakova, SEO specialist at 3R Sales & Marketing. “NTC did a brilliant job with their new website, so we could easily move on to the keyword and competitive research. After setting up the meta tags and other areas of the on-page optimisation, we proceeded with link building, submissions to web directories and article marketing. We now continue to closely monitor the rankings and take actions to maintain or even improve the keyword positions.”

Results

“Our relationship has lasted over two years now and we are very happy with the results which 3R have achieved for us. We appear in the number one place for all our relevant search terms and while our ability to expand is limited because of the nature of our educational business model we have achieved full enrolment on our programmes in a much shorter timeframe than that which existed before using SEO.

I would recommend 3R without hesitation and would also advise any business using SEO services to make sure that they are in it for the long haul as any benefits achieved through initial optimisation can disappear quickly if SEO is not carried out constantly. I look at SEO as a service akin to electricity, i.e. it’s a bill that has to be paid every month but which provides a valuable service.” Greg added.

About 3R Sales & Marketing

3R Sales and Marketing (http://www.3r.ie) is an Irish sales and marketing consultancy founded in Ireland in 2004, providing clients with proven sales, marketing and business strategies that are strongly based on business growth.  Key services provided are online marketing, sales and marketing strategy, customer service training and business English courses for non-native English speakers.

Make sure that you use your top keywords in your website copy. The text of your pages should contain your keywords in the exact phrasing as you have them in your meta tags and title. To make this even stronger, you can make them bold.

This is a crucial step to get conversions, since when people search for “your [YourTown]”, they want to see a page on your in [YourTown]. A conversion is when a customer contacts you regarding your offering or signs up for a newsletter or takes any action you would like them to take.

When your web page does not include the keyword your customer typed in when looking for your products, it is not very likely that they will keep browsing your website. Moreover, it is recommended that you create a separate page for each of your keyword, or combination of keywords.

The more text, the better for search engine spiders when they index a website; it is strongly recommended that your homepage has at least 200-300 words of “visible” text. Moreover, search engine spiders crawl especially the first 20 words of your website so try to keep an eye on them and make them really relevant to what your website is about.

Unless you are an online marketing consultant or at least have some experience with online marketing, you might realise one day that there are abbreviations that marketing people use every day but nobody ever explains them clearly.

This is what we think are the vital “must-knows” of online marketing:

• SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
  Any aspect of online marketing that is aimed at improving your ranking in search engines, such as Google or Yahoo.

• PPC = Pay per Click
  An online advertising campaign run by search engines like Google or Yahoo, where you pay only when somebody clicks on your ad and gets to your website; ad impressions are free unless anybody clicks on them. Google Adwords are an example.

• CPC = Cost per Click
  How much you pay for one click on your ad in a PPC campaign.

The first step of your SEO (after you have optimised your website for customers) is to make the best keyword list possible. A keyword is a word or a phrase people who are looking for products type in Google. For example, one of your keywords may be “your”.

However, it is better to focus on specific key phrases that will get more highly targeted people to your site. That means, do not use just “your”, as there are many people searching for this word, but many of them might be actually looking for a job in your, for example. Also, the competition is usually much stronger with these words, so it will take more time to get ranked on the first page.

Instead, go for longer keyword phrases and combinations such as “your [YourTown]”, “your company” etc.

Moreover, I would advise you to apply the following methodology to choose the right key words:

1. Organize a brainstorming with your co-workers, business partners, friends, relatives or even customers to find keywords relevant to your your business. Focus on the needs of customers, what they would type in when looking for products.
2. Check out your competitors’ websites for ideas. View the source HTML code and take a look at keywords in their meta tags (you will learn below how to do this). They could be a good tip for yours!
3. Try to make a list of 100 keywords minimum. It’s recommended to use a search term suggestion tool (such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool). It will give you an idea what your phrases have been searched for recently. Just make sure that you pick the appropriate location.

When you have your 7 keywords for every of your main pages, the next step is to place them on your website, in the correct way.

There are a few places where you definitely should have them – some are pretty obvious, some are slightly hidden – so let’s make sure you get them all right!

Title

<Title> is one of the most powerful SEO techniques you have, so make sure you use it creatively! When search engine results are displayed, e.g. on Google’s search results page, the title is the first thing people see as a link to your website.

You can also see the title of the website you are just viewing on the top of your browser window.

Thus each page should have a different <title> with 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning. The title should explain in a few short words (your keywords) the intent of the page. Don’t put your company name first – place your keywords first and if you feel you absolutely must have the company name in the title, add it second.

Despite its importance, rather do not overdo it with the length of the <title> tag; 50-150 characters including spaces should be appropriate, even though some SEO gurus recommend 70 max. You also should make the title enticing, so that the viewers of search engines listings will click to see your website.

Description Meta Tag

Below the <title>, there is usually the description meta tag which is considered by Google as the first sentence on a page.

The Description Meta tag is also fairly important. Your description should have 2 or 3 of your keyword phrases at the beginning and so should your first sentence on the website. Just like the <title>, reflect the content and try to keep there no more than 200 characters including spaces. Change the words around enough so that you can hit various typings of your keywords.

Compared to title, description meta tag should be rather a sentence or two, not just a list of keywords. Make sure you use speech marks correctly as appropriate.

You should have a different title, description and a first sentence on each page. You may also want to try shorter titles with only one keyword or keyword phrase as this will raise you keyword relevance.

Keyword Meta Tag

Although many people rely on them so much when performing SEO, meta tags have decreased in importance recently, but are still worth using for clarity and search results. Their initial purpose was to help search engines find out important information about your page which they might have had difficulty determining otherwise.

The Keyword tag is now the least important but is still used by some engines. As you never know when the rules of the search engines will change, or a new engine will want them, so take the time to include these tags in all your web pages. We recommend you do not overdo it with keywords as well; your keyword meta tag should not exceed 250 characters including spaces.

When performing SEO, you should take the exact same keyword phrase from your keyword meta tag, and use it in the copy of your page, title tag, meta description, text content of the page etc. Any keyword phrases which are only used in your keyword meta tag, will not have enough prominence to help your listings for that phrase.

Now upload these meta tags to the web pages. You might need a hand from your web designer – it should be a very quick issue for them.

Many your website owners do not make it easy, clear and secure for people to contact them – if you want customers to contact you directly from your website, keep the process simple.

In general, over 60 percent of online shoppers abort the ordering process once they’ve entered the shopping cart. It’s a pity that after gaining their attention, interest and desire you can still lose them due to a complicated, unclear or unsafe contact form. To prevent this, try to follow the advice:

• Tell your visitors upfront about what they should do in order to get in touch with you.
• Make sure that your contact pages and forms are easy to understand. Test them with your customers or relatives even if they don’t browse the Internet very often.
• Make sure that your contact page shows an understandable notice if the customer forgets to enter the email address or any other required field.
• Make sure that your contact pages work in every geographical area you target. Some countries don’t have postal numbers or their regional structuring can be different from yours.
• It’s very important that your contact pages are secure.
• Test your contact pages regularly in order to make sure they work.
• Also make the contact form easier to fill in – in most cases, all you probably need will be name, phone, email, and the comment field – they don’t need to be mandatory.

After you implement the above steps, you might see that your online marketing has moved to the next level.

Another important part of a web page from SEO point of view are the links. As mentioned already, your links should not direct visitors to your home page or elsewhere other than the next step towards reaching your goal.

What is also relevant, is the anchor text, i. e. the clickable text of the hyperlink – for SEO purposes, make sure it contains your keywords as well, don’t leave it just as “Click here to sign up”, but mention your product as well: “Enquire about products now”.

Similarly, your pictures also have so called alternative text (set as “alt” tag), which is the text that people will see when their browser for certain reason cannot display the picture.

You can also see alt tags when you hover over the picture with your mouse.

To make sure your alt tags contain your best keywords, you will probably need to talk to your web developer.

One of the crucial steps of search engine optimisation would be to include your keywords in the headings of your page – in HTML code these are marked as <h1>Heading 1</h1>, <h2>Heading 2</h2> etc. You should have only one Heading 1 and more Headings 2 and 3 on any page.

Headings are a very important attention-grabbing essence of your pages. People will not read your entire content. That’s why it is smart to divide your pages into short paragraphs and to highlight each of them with a killer headline which will not only catch their attention, but also tell them in a second what the whole paragraph is about.

For the SEO purposes, make sure that your headlines are marked <h1>Headline#1<h1>, <h2>Headline#2</h2> etc. and that they contain your best keywords. Apart from the keywords, use words like “zero-cost, proven, benefit, first, discover, complete, exclusive, how to…” in order to gain people’s attention.

Although SEO might seem to be a simple and relatively easy-to-use way of improving your website ranking, which helps your customers find your website easier, there is also a possibility of abuse. This can finally lead to your website being excluded from the search engines listings. Therefore it is crucial to know the difference between techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design (so called “White Hat” SEO) and those that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimise their effect (referred to as “Black Hat” SEO or spamdexing).

Another interesting fact to know is that search engines change their search criteria daily. There are usually very subtle changes an average website owner does not need to track. Their purpose is to prevent spamdexing or at least make it as difficult as possible.

Bad search engine optimisation techniques can get you blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density too high, mirror pages and mirror sites.

While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for short time in the long run they will hurt your website.

Therefore we recommend you rather avoid the following:

• Doing anything to trick the search engines. If what you are doing is not listed as one of the previous “white hat SEO” the search engines will likely view it as spam and penalise you.
• List keywords anywhere except in your keywords meta tag. It is thus not usual to name keywords alone without any other “sentence stuffing”. Search engines know this and will consider you spamdexing.
• Use the same colour text on your page as the page’s background colour. This has been used by some people to stuff their web pages with keywords, which is not a clear practice. Search engines are able to detect this and view it as spam.
• Use the same meta tag more than once on the same web page, for example using more than one title tag.
• Use any keywords in your keywords meta tag that do not relate to the content of your website.

Once we have optimised the website for customers, let’s make sure that Google and other search engines will find it and show it to people who type in your related search terms.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) means “optimising” your website for search engines, so that, ideally, your website will come up as one of the first 10 sites when people search for keywords related to your. This is essential to your website traffic (understand, “number of visitors”) which might lead to further sales leads generation.