shanemcdonald.org

Its been a while since I posted a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) post and this is quite a useful one for choosing your SEO Keywords or Key-Phrases for you TITLE, DESCRIPTION and BODY content.

This tool from Google is called “Google Trends” and it allows you to view relative search volumes and seasonal keyword search trends between two or more keyword phrases. For example if you want to see how people are searching on the web, you can include these keywords into Google Trends and leave it do its work. Below, I have done a search for Golf Course, Golf Club and Golf Links for the past 12 months using the Irish Datacentres.  Golf Club and Golf Course are usually the same thing in reality, but what do people search for?

This can show that Golf Club is used more than Golf Course. This is important when choosing your SEO Keywords. So if you are a Golf Course you can choose to go for the most searched term “Golf Club” or the less competitive term “Golf Course”. Selecting a less competitive search term can help you when you setup a website. If you are promoting a very competitive keyword, e.g. “music download” which is the second most competitive keyword term, you can try combine this into a niche 3 word phrase, e.g. “classical music download” , “free music download” or “irish music download”. You can then use Google Trends to see which keyword combination would be best for you.

If you were to search for something like “Festival” or “Mothers Day” you would be able to see the annual trends for these terms, which may be interesting for you when selecting keywords for your business website.

This is only one use for Google trends and there is much more that this system offers.

For a bit of fun, take a look at this Google Trend : LINK
It shows how talk of Recession is going down and Cheating is going up. Especially a huge spike , dated November 19th, when Theirry “Le Cheat” Henry decided he wanted to take up Gaelic Football for a few seconds.

Play around with Google trends and you should find some uses to assist your SEO Keyword Research.

Everyone wants to be #1 on Google, #1 on Yahoo and #1 on MSN. Years ago when the internet started to become popular and search engines were not as clever as they are now, getting to #1 for lets say the term SEO on a search engine was easy. You did this…

<meta name="keywords" content="SEO, SEO, SEO, SEO Optimisation,
SEO Tips, SEO Advice, SEO tricks" />

… basically you crammed the keywords into your website and you got good listings on search engines. Sometimes the keywords might go on for 1,000 characters or more.

These days, if you spam keywords (also called keyword stuffing), you can expect a backlash – your site will either be banned or be penalised.

Here are 5 primary tips on how you can improve your websites search engine positioning;

1. Update your website regularly - regular website updates ensure that your content is always fresh and also shows the search engines that this content is being maintained. You will find that sites which are updated more regularly get visited more by the spiders.
2. Write Original Content – NEVER, copy content from another website. Always write your own content as Google does not like duplicated content. Write the content with the customer or website visitor in mind. Also when naming your website files, don’t call the pages page1.html, page2.html – if it is a page for SEO Tips and Advice, then call the page good-SEO-tips.html so if your website is www.shanes-seo-tips.com your page will be at www.shanes-seo-tips.com/good-SEO-tips.html and not www.shanes-seo-tips.com/page2.html – as this can hel your SEO also.
3. Include Good Meta data - On each page have a unique TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS. The content of these meta tags should identify the content on your website. Choose good Title and Description tags. If you are stuck, try use the first few lines of the pages content as a guide and reduce it to about 200-230 characters. Keep the Title at a length of 50 – 80 characters.
   3(b). Include ALT Text – for each image used on your website, include ALT Text, which means when a user hovers over an image or indeed if an image does not load, descriptive text will appear, describing the contents of the image which did not load. Include a keyword or two in your ALT text where possible.
4. Generate a SiteMap – Include a text based site map on your site, which means the search engine robots can navigate your website and index all your pages. Site maps can be in XML format or in HTML – avan better if you can include both.
5. Check your site - This is a simple thing but often overlooked. Check your website for spelling errors, HTML Errors, Broken Links, Server Side Includes (SSI) which are not loading, Images which are not loading.

Before you implement these on your site…

(1) make a backup of your site – if you mess up the meta data, better going back to something which works rather than starting from scratch.
and
(2) record your current positions in search engines – that way you can measure your success rates, e.g. we were in position 56 last week and now we are at position #11 for the keyword “SEO Advice”. Keep monitoring your progress. Eventually this progress will slow down and you may need to implement some more advanced SEO techniques.

The tips above are all suited to those who have a basic knowledge of HTML syntax and are aimed at websites which have little or no SEO work done on them.

If you require a basic HTML introduction, leave a post with your comments and I will upload one.

Tips for Organic SEO #2 will appear on the blog soon – bookmark the tab “Search Engine Optimization” on this site.

The tips above have been used on many sites before and are known to work – however I accept no responsibility for anyones individual implementation or incorrect implemetation of these tips – I know they work and I would be very surprised if they did not work on any website which has decent textual content and which has not been optimised previously.