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.

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.

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.

Pay per Click campaigns, apart from attracting visitors to your website, are an excellent source of indispensable information about how often individual keywords are being searched for and whether customers who come to your website searching for these keywords actually buy your services/contact you etc. This is one of the basics we need to know when we are choosing keywords for on-page optimisation (SEO).

We reckon that this data is even more relevant to the reality than the data provided by available free keyword tools.

It is not that difficult – having run and tracked your PPC campaigns for some time, you will easily find out which keywords are performing the best for you. In the next stage, you will simply include these keywords in your website more often and try to create content more relevant to these keywords. Best performing keywords should be in your meta tags as well.

You might ask how to know whether a keyword performs well or not. There are various indicators of this and you might decide which ones to follow. However, we recommend using them in the following priority order:

• The most important, something you probably want most to get from your SEO and PPC campaigns, is a high number of conversions. A conversion is when a visitor clicks on any page of your website you choose and set as a conversion goal. Usually, these pages are those which show after a visitor bought something, or signed up for your newsletter.
• Another one successful performance indicator is click-through rate (CTR).
• Apart from the above mentioned, you should also control your costs per click (CPC). Google Adwords campaign costs are partly based on CTR of your particular keywords – the higher CTR you achieve, the less you pay for a click. So if you want to save your budget, make sure your keywords match to your ads.
• Impressions are another measure you can see in your PPC stats. They tell you how many times your ad has been displayed. However, when you get high impressions without sufficient number of clicks, your CTR decreases and you pay more for every click. I definitely would not recommend using high impressions automatically as a positive criterion of assessing your keyword performance.However, Impressions can give you a good indication on what keywords are being searched for most, so that you can then include them in your search engine optimisation.

Another very useful option you have is to submit your original articles to free article directories. Again, you will find hundreds of them on the Internet. However, the two most important and most effective article portals are:

• www.ezinearticles.com
• www.isnare.com – here you can get your article distributed to thousands of other article portals just for $2 per article – we strongly recommend.

What is important to note is that in the author bio, you should include a link to your website, so you can use your HTML link code again, but this time embedded in a bit of description about yourself.

This article was written by [Your Name] of [YourCompany] offering <a href=”http://www.YourWebsite.com” title=”Keyword1,Keyword2, Keyword3”>Keyword1</a> in [YourTown].

Which will appear as:

This article was written by [YourName] of [YourCompany] offering [Keyword1] in [YourTown].

And this is the link you are getting, since most article marketing portals will not allow you to use your link in the body of the article, nor to promote your company in any way.

Internet Marketing Ireland – would you rather read about 10 Tips for Websites Earning 1,000’s 24/7?

Then have a look at this snappy article and see how you can maximise the profits from your online business.

Technorati Tags: internet marketing ireland, internet marketing, online marketing, online marketing ireland, online business, seo, search engine optimisation, website marketing

A very successful businesswoman running a catering business asked me for some advice on her Google Adwords campaign. Was thinking it could be worth sharing with you.

So I’ve had a look – firstly, I switched off the content network, which was just lowering your CTR and it is not really effective unless you run special campaigns for it.

However, generally speaking, it was one of the better campaigns that I’ve seen so far.

There are more steps I will do when I will optimise the account, and this actually ties in with developing a new website, as for example with the current one, it’s quite difficult to track conversions automatically, as they don’t have a separate “thank you” page.

So in the meantime, maybe a small suggestion, if you want to capture more people, you can include more keywords using Keyword tool, which will give you a list of the keywords being searched for most.  

Just be sure all keywords you add, will be totally relevant to what you do.

A second useful thing to do would be to create another ad, which would differ from the current one just in one thing, eg the title. Then you’ll be able to see which gives you better CTR and more clicks, and use that one.

Hope this helps at least a bit. Let me know if you have any questions.

Many webmasters ignore the real potential of an external SEO, in fact they just think of changing the website content, keywords and run a google adwords campaign and that is it! What a shame because External SEO is just as important as Internal! Given that external SEO comes down to incoming linking, its objective is to attract web users and turn them to customers, so don’t miss the opportunity to increase your online revenues!

Here are some tips specially for you:

• Incoming Links

Incoming links is probably one of the most important external factor. This is also known as “link popularity”. The quality and the quantity of links really matter in that case. The best thing is to get deep and contextual links. The notion “deep” here means that websites does not just link to the landing page of another website but to internal pages. Then “Contextual” means that one page of a website contains links from related ones and with surrounding texts that deal with the subject of this web page.

• Good Content
This factor will have a real impact if a web page have a good “value-added” content that visitors are searching for. If a website have an interesting content, other webmasters will naturally link to this. Thereupon it will generate web traffic.

• Social Network Bookmarklets
It is very important to add in websites social networking bookmarklets such as AddThis.com. Thus, in case a visitor really enjoys what he read on website he can “bookmark” it with one of other social networking sites. It will temporary boost the traffic to this website.

• Blogs/forums Signatures and Leaving Comments
Most of webmasters ignore that simple factor. Indeed it has the advantageous situation of being free and easy to do. This method involves participating in forums and/or blogs (both is better) posting replies or comments. Regarding forums most of them allow to have a “signature” appended to the bottom of a post where a link to a website can be put in. Concerning blogs, when commenting on it, they often ask for names and website URL. When the comment is displayed, it will show the name with a link to the website mentioned. by leaving comments on other people’s blog or posting answer to forums, it will the web traffic to one website.

• Directory Submission
As the name of this method indicates, the main objective is to get listed in many directories. There are many of them, however they have to be select according to the business activity of the website owner.

• Link Exchanges
Finally the last very simple step: Exchange of text links between webmasters to create traffic.

If you follow these simple rules you will have concrete result in terms of web traffic for sure. 3R remains at your entire disposal for any queries or question, do not hesitate to contact us!