Have you been trying with little or no success to get people to visit your website? Take heart because you’re not alone. Thousands of websites are created daily globally, but few of these ever get to be viewed by web users. The secret to unlocking the doors of web traffic often lies with mastering the art of search engine optimization; properly done, SEO can greatly improve your search engine ranking resulting to the positive consequence of increased traffic.

SEO is not magic and can be easily mastered by anyone with a deep desire to learn, neither does it involve tricks or hacks. SEO is all about designing your website with consideration to what search engines deem important and providing useful content to end users. Below are five steps to implementing SEO.

Step 1. Keyword Selection

SEO requires that you select keywords or key phrases that properly describes your page content. Your web content should consist of three things namely:

The phrase or keyword should consist of the essence of your web copy. If your web content is about dog food, then an example target phrase could be “Dog food” and not just “Dog”.

Accuracy of keywords; many people make the mistake of choosing keywords based on their phonetic similarity to other words such as “sheep” for “ship” and optimise with these matches which often results to no-ranking.

Popularity of target keyword

A good example is the point number 3 above ; if your web copy is about “Dog food” for example, you can’t optimize using “Dog chow” because people hardly search using the term.

There are various free search engine optimization tools that you can use to locate proper targeted phrases and key words. Some are:

Google Keyword Tool: This is a great tool that you can use when brainstorming for keywoord phrases.

Overture by Yahoo: a great tool for keyword brainstorming and popularity assessment.

Word Tracker: a great tool for competitive analysis and popularity assessment of targeted keywords.

Step 2. competitive intelligence

The second crucial step in SEO is competitive intelligence, to learn who your competition is. SEO work is mostly focussed on individual pages within a website. This means that you may end up locating other sites selling similar products with phrase like “Dog food”, just keep in mind that your competition could be more specialised. Use Google and Yahoo to find out what comes up when you search using your target key phrase.

Step 3. Write your web copy

Search engine optimization is not all about meta tags. Take the following focused approach to search engine optimization:

* Include your target phrase twice in the meta title tag and ensure that the title is “clickable”.

* Add the target phrase twice in the meta description.

* Add the target phrase in the meta keywords.

* Add the target phrase in the title or headline for your page.

Step 4. Promote Your Site

Make sure that when you announce your page, you use your target phrase in both the link text and any explanatory text.

Step 5. Check Your Results and Modify

If the major search engines don’t craw your site on time them submit your site URL to them.

Now that Google has released news regarding the inclusion of website’s speed as one of the factors responsible for website search engine ranking, it is obvious that most website owners would get want delve into matter, a bit more deep. According to the statement, it is clear that the websites having lower loading speed would have less probability of making their way to the search engine result pages than those that load up faster. Although, as per the official Google blog, it has been said that minimal changes can appear in the ranking after applying this new parameter, the buzz is still strong enough to put aggressive SEO experts in action. They surely wish to learn all the possible ways that can be used to optimize the loading speed of the website to offer an added benefit to their clients along with the regular SEO services. However, in order to learn the ways to optimize website load speed, it is important to know the factors that affect the speed of a website.

Factors affecting speed of the website

• Poor internet connection: Narrow internet connection where server is bearing the load of multiple websites, can affect your website’s loading time, adversely. To overcome this problem, it is recommended to make a shift to a dedicated virtual or physical or join hands with a more efficient web hosting company.

• Image size volume: Images contribute heavily in reducing the loading speed of a website. Let us consider a few points that may help in the same context.

• Many sites in order to appear more captivating and attractive heavily use images, which eventually reduces the site’s speed. Hence, all useless images should be removed.
• Images containing text should rather be replaced with text, styled with CSS. Probably, the process can be effortlessly executed on your main and secondary navigation. This also increases the visibility and accessibility of the website to both search engines and visitors.

Important images should be ensured to be created to fit the size they are presented in.

• And finally, optimize the image files themselves. Where small images are saved as GIF and PNG files, for large product images, JPEG format should be used. Make efforts to save the images “for the Web”.

Statistically, with proper optimization of the images, the total page size can be reduced to half or more. Therefore, this has been seen as the most influential techniques to increase website’s speed along with converting your site to CSS.

• Databases: Considerable thought should be given to your database. Analyze thoroughly, whether or not, you require the database solution. If in case you do not find any primary requirement, it is best to switch to static pages, as otherwise, you may merge a few of them to have them all load quicker.

• HTML code size: If your website layout comprises of tables then reduce the total HTML size by about 50%. This can be done by converting your site to CSS for layout. In addition to boosting up your site’s speed, this will also enhance your display in liquid layout and make it easy to edit.

• Javascript files size: Those who are using Javascript on their site need to analyze its significance because things like mouse-over can be performed by all browsers without any scripts. If required use your Javascript in external files and connect them with the help of the tag. This will ensure faster loading speed, without letting search engines clog on Javascript.

In the end, it is important to state that whether or not, this becomes a major part of effective SEO services, it definitely will get you more visitors, which eventually augment your site’s popularity.

How many times do you see the question asked? When building backlinks should you go for quantity or quality? Despite the question having been answered many times before, you still see people new to internet marketing (and some more experienced too) asking the same question about building backlinks as part of their SEO campaign.If you’re a regular on many of the internet marketing or SEO forums, you’ll invariably come across adverts offering to build you thousands of backlinks almost overnight. To seemingly add value, they try to entice you with supposedly higher pagerank or even the odd.edu or.gov backlink in there.

It’s a common trap to fall into. I mean backlinks are what makes Google and the other search engines think your site is important right? The more links, the more votes for your website or webpage; so it makes sense to go for the biggest number in the fastest time possible doesn’t it?Well, sorry to say but the reality is that it doesn’t work that way. If you take a course with someone who really knows what they’re doing, you’ll learn that it’s the quality of the backlinks that really matters.

Sure, if you can get a high number of QUALITY backlinks, linking to you in a natural way, then go for it but make sure you know what quality really means

The reality is that to give you the biggest boost in rankings, the backlinks to your site need to be high quality in that they should be relevant to your topic; the linking site should be seen as an authority type site; the linking site should itself have backlinks from other equally relevant and authoritative sites; and the link text should also be relevant. Getting the picture?

A smaller number of very high quality links will do more for your rankings in the search engines than thousands of backlinks from disreputable and down-right dodgy sites.

In short, if you’re thinking that quantity over quality is the answer then you need to take a step back and consider this:

1. Rankings boost is likely to be temporary

If the search engines suddenly see a new website or webpage getting thousands of links especially if this is way more than the levels of traffic your website is getting, then they are bound to raise a flag and wonder if its natural. Why bother with all that effort if you suddenly get a penalty so you end up in a worse position than before you started?

2. Focus Your Efforts

In the same amount of time it would take you to build thousands of questionable links, you could build a small number of quality backlinks and get the same or, more likely, better results – especially in the long term. Even using automated tools, you’ll probably still take less time manually getting those quality backlinks than the junk volume.

3. Exactly what IS your link and from where?

The search engines do actually consider where your link is coming from and what the link actually is. What I mean is this. Which do you think would be rated higher: a link from a link directory or a page of links on some unrelated webpage, or a link in the middle of a high quality piece of content which is totally relevant and on-topic?

Now, don’t get me wrong. Some of the simple links are still valuable but there are so many ways of getting high quality links that you should focus more on the quality of you want long-term rankings improvement. The major benefit will be that you actually get traffic as well as the backlink and surely that’s got to be worth it.

4. It’s all about relationships

Backlinks demonstrate the strength of the relationships you have with others on the internet and, most importantly, what they think of you. Hang around in a dodgy neighbourhood and you’ll be thought of in a similar way. BU executing a quality backlinking campaign, you not only build up the link-related aspects, you’ll also build up actual relationships with other webmasters which could lead to more business later. Just think along the lines of Joint Ventures, list swaps, and so on.

So, when it comes to building backlinks to your website, don’t be in awe of big numbers. Focus on building quality backlinks and your rankings will improve and stay there for the long term; and that can only lead to bigger profits!

Social Bookmarking sites are extremely fast and easy to join and they can prove to be an extremely useful tool in helping you to spread the word about your business interests and any other content that you have written that is connected to those interests.

Not all bookmarks that you ad will be found by other people and not all of the ones that are found will be bookmarked or highlighted as favourites by other people either but nevertheless, every entry still has the potential power to generate traffic and the search facilities within each bookmarking site will give you a chance of showing up in the results each time a keyword or phrase that you have used is searched for.Although it can vary from site to site, you will normally have the ability to include a title, short description and string of relevant tags for your entry. The title should be short and straight to the point. These can be factual or simply intriguing in order to draw the reader’s attention and the description should pique the interest of the visitor to encourage them to read further. Whatever way you put it all together, think of it as performing the in the same way as a resource box at the foot of an article. You want to get as many people as possible to click through to your product or service by using your link.

However you put it together, your intention is purely to get as many people as possible to click through to your website or the website of your vendor to buy the product or service that you are currently promoting. If they click though and they like what it is you have to show them, they are likely to show their appreciation by bookmarking the site themselves. This will give you a naturally generated increase in ranking within the bookmarking site for that item with the possibility that it will be seen by more and more people.

Tags are essentially the same thing as keywords. You need to ensure that you tag every entry with as many relevant and strong keywords as you can, because they will all increase your entry’s chances of being found by other people. There are a number of free online keyword tool sites which will help you to discover which keywords will be the most effective in marketing your particular product or service online.

Some sites limit the amount of tags you may use so just make sure to make use of whatever space you have without repeating yourself. Submit your pages to as many social bookmarking sites as you possibly can find. This will ensure that your chances of being found online increase each day and it helps to create backlinks from other sites to your own. Backlinks are extremely important to generate traffic to your site and helps your search engine rankings climb higher, so do all that you can to bookmark as many pages with as many sites as possible.

SEO (search engine optimization) keywords are the backbone of every highly successful marketing venture. The number one goal of every SEO sexpert is to gain the highest quality of return on their investment (or that of their client’s ).

Accomplishing this begins with developing a keyword strategy. This article will sexplain in easy to understand terms the four simple steps that go into creating and implementing a solid SEO keyword strategy. The four steps are:

• Brainstorming keywords: The first step is to get out a sheet of paper and write down as many keywords that you can think of that may be relevant to the main topic of your website. It may help to imagine a potential visitor with a challenge that your website can help solve. Unfortunately, this person does not know about you or your site. Ask yourself what keywords this potential visitor might place in the search box. This will help to give you some ideas for the best keywords. Remember… the search engines bring up web pages that are the best match for the web surfers search term.
• Core term keywords: Don’t let this fancy word stump you. Core term keywords are the keywords that the content of your subtopic is built around. In this second step, you will be narrowing down your keyword list. Cross out any keywords that are irrelevant to your websites focus. Keep the keywords that best describe the content on your site. The most general keywords will be on your home page. The subtopic pages you build off of the main page will contain your core term keywords.
• Keyword clusters: Once you have a tighter list of keywords then you will begin to create keyword clusters by grouping some of your keywords together.
• Map out your website using your chosen clusters: Your home page will have the most general keyword and your other pages will be keywords based on the subtopics of your main topic.

To make this a bit easier to understand, imagine you are building a website on Baseball Sports. Your main page will be your main topic..Baseball Sports / Sports Baseball may be possible keywords you will use. Your secondary pages (those that you will have listed on your menu) may be something like:

Core Term Keywords for the Main Keyword Baseball Sports:

A. Baseball Shoes
B. Baseball Bat
C. Baseball Bat bag
D. Baseball Costumes

Your keyword clusters will be subtopics under each subtopic and may or may not be listed on the menu but will be considered your internal web pages.

Here is an example of the website layout to help give you a better idea.

Baseball Sports (main keyword)

A. Baseball Shoes (keyword core term)

1. Low Baseball Cleats
2. Baseball Cleat
3. Mid Baseball Cleats

The keywords above are called keyword clusters. The bottom line here is that you want the content of your website to be tightly focused on your chosen topic and keywords relevant to that topic. Always keep in mind that your writing for two audiences, the search engines and the visitors who come to your site.

SEO can seem pretty confusing – and it seems that many in the game like to keep it that way. Since starting on the track of SEO Copywriting just over six months ago, I’ve learnt a whole lot from SEO gurus Reload Media & SEO Copywriter Glenn Murray. From lists, headings, bold text & captions, to tricks to check you’re on track; here are some of the top tips I’ve picked up along the way.Wordle is a nifty website that can help you see your web copy much the way that Google sees it. It will show you by way of a word cloud visual which words in your copy are the most frequently used. All you need to do is enter your text into the box and hit ‘Go’.Considering we are a web design agency, and they are among our most prominent words in the image – we can see we’re on track with our copy – letting Google know what our site is about, whilst still (and most importantly) making perfect sense to humans.

Secondly, it’s important to target one keyword per page, or group of pages. As a web design agency in Brisbane, we would of course target web design – but what about everything else we offer? SEO Copywriting, Email Marketing, Domains & Hosting, Internet Strategy and Updates & Support (to name a few!) also need to be optimised.

The great thing about that is – if a page is about SEO copywriting, it makes sense that you’ll be using that phrase a whole lot anyway!

When it comes to the actual copywriting, here are some hints, using the way both humans and Google read & understand copy as a starting point.

HEADINGS:

Humans love headings – it helps us decide what it is we’re reading about very quickly, without having to take in the whole body of text. Google recognises that & so it rates headings as one of the most important factors in deciding what a page is about. So, the moral of the story?

Optimise your headings! BUT – make sure you don’t just use your keywords out of context, headings should be totally indicative of that section. Your readers come first!

An example of this is: SEO Copywriting – Making Sense To Humans & Google
Read: Keywords – Context

LISTS:

Another device that helps readers make sense of large bodies of information is the trusty list. They’re great for:

- Scanning over & getting a quick summary,
- Persuading the reader of the key points; and
- Optimising your copy – again, Google knows people like lists, so Google likes them too.
- If possible, limit your bullet points, lists lose their value if they go on & on. Also, the closer your keywords are to the bullet point, the better.

BOLD:

People use bold words as hooks. And yet again, Google has taken its cue from the way a human visitor acts – bold words are important to us so bold words are important to Google. Glenn Murray points out though – what is important to the customer might be different to what’s important to a reader looking for benefits. So it’s important to strike a balance.

LINKS:

When linking to other pages, Google assumes that the first two words of the link are really important & indicate what the page you’re linking to will be about. It will assume that what you’re linking to is relevant to the content you’re covering too.

The thing is, if you really want your audience to follow the link (& find it helpful & in turn, find your page helpful) then engagement should come first. A ‘read how’ start to a link might be better than keywords in the long run.

CAPTIONS:

Used to describe images, captions are mostly redundant to the human eye. BUT – Google can’t understand imagery, so captions are a very important way for Google to figure out what you’re on about. With that in mind, ALWAYS start captions with keywords.

VARIANTS:

Google is smart enough to know that if your page is about SEO copywriting, your page will also use stems or variants of that phrase. It will pick up on lots of different combinations so you can mix your keyword phrases up as much as you can creatively manage whilst still making sense. You can also break your phrase up with grammar.

For example: Need help understanding SEO? Copywriting tips from leaders in the field….

That said, keep the words in the phrase right next to each other where possible, they’re much more effective that way.

When it comes to SEO, word count is important. Here’s a rough guide to what you should be aiming for in your copy, courtesy of Glenn Murray.

100-150 words for a homepage – it’s important for most valuable information to be “above the fold” (in view without needing to scroll down), 250-500 words for pages lower in the site hierarchy – this might include product or service pages or “about us” pages; and 300-1000 words for blog posts.

And lastly, true to being a copywriter – Murray reminds his readers that it’s all about the benefits to the reader. So, to get people to read your site you need an effective headline and description for your Google listing.

Your description meta tag isn’t used for ranking – so think of it as ad copy and don’t bother trying to optimise. But your heading? It’s of utmost importance.

The four criteria for a successful headline:

Spark personal interest,
Offer a quick, easy way,
Share some news; and
Incite curiosity