The first part of this process is identifying the key terms to target. These terms should be what you expect your target audience to be entering into a search engine in order to find a site like your own. Studying the keywords currently being used to find your site can help identify which terms are already working well. There are also key term analysis tools, such as Yahoo’s Overture and Wordtracker, that can help identify which key terms are worth pursuing. If you use pay-per-click advertising (such as Google AdWords) you can study your campaigns’ performance to see which terms are being frequently used and how your site is rated against them. Ideally, the terms you choose to target should be frequently searched for but return few other results. More specific terms are often less competitive and bring in visitors with a better idea of what they are looking for. For example, target the term ‘women’s shoes’ and you’ll find yourself competing with millions of other web sites; refine your term to ‘custom made bridal shoes’ and you’ll find not only that there are fewer sites competing for the term, but also that the visitors finding your site using this term have a clearer idea of what they are looking for. For an e-commerce site, if a customer can find what they are looking for, they are more likely to buy. Applying key terms Having identified the set of key terms that we hope will attract our target audience we can now begin applying SEO techniques in order to improve our ranking. As we do there are a few things that we need to bear in mind.
Firstly:
The content is ultimately for visitors; so it needs to be well written. Throwing in a bunch of key terms where they don’t belong will actually have a detrimental effect on a page’s ranking. Even Google advises you to focus on the users and not the search engines […] Ask yourself what creates value for your users.
Secondly:
Your use of key terms should be consistent; using the same terms throughout your content will help to reinforce their importance and subsequently affect how relevant search engines feel the page is.
Page titles & descriptions The structure of each web page allows you to define a title (which displays on the browser’s menu bar) and description (which will not be visible to visitors) within the source of the page. All too often these elements are overlooked and pages will be given short titles such as ‘Home’ or ‘MyCompanyName: Home’. These elements, however, carry a lot of weight when a search engine comes to rating a page’s relevancy. Using your key terms in a page’s title and then repeating these in a short description will have a positive effect on your ranking. For example, the home page of Mercurytide-built DirectDoors.com has the title ‘Buy Interior Doors and Exterior Doors Online’; this helps it sit top in a search for ‘interior doors’ or ‘exterior doors’ on google.co.uk and within the first page of results on google.com.
In addition, this title and description will be displayed in the list of search results seen by your target audience, so it is important to make a good first impression.
Headings
Within the main content of your web page you have the opportunity to give each section a heading (this text is usually larger than other text). Again, search engines treat these headings with great importance and should be populated with key terms, where appropriate.
A common mistake made is to fill a top level heading (the <h1> tag) with the company name. Any content within this heading will be treated as the most important text on the page. Is your company’s name really the most important detail on the page? This heading should describe the page, not tell you who it belongs to. Using your key terms, in context, within this heading will do far more for your ranking.
URL design
URLs (a.k.a. web addresses) offer another, often overlooked, opportunity to exploit our key terms. By using key terms within a page’s address we yet again reinforce the importance of these terms. Consider the following sample URLs: http://www.example.com/proddetail.php?id=12345&cat=42&nav=11 and http://www.example.com/42/12345/ They mean nothing to man or machine (in fact, many search engines won’t even bother indexing the first example). These URLs could easily be rewritten to be more meaningful, such as the example below:
http://www.example.com/childrens-toys/baby-elephant-soft-toy/
From the above URL it’s easy to see what the page is about and search engines take this into account when calculating a page’s relevancy for search results. As well as being better for search engines, URLs of this design will also be better for your site visitors. Any visitor to this page can easily assume that in order to return to the children’s toys main page, they have only to remove the ‘baby-elephant…’ part of the URL.