This guest post comes to us via Ilga. She’s a creative online marketing consultant located in Berlin, Germany. She’s been passionate about all things Google and SEO for about 10 years and has run her own business for over 3 years, helping clients gaining more visitors for their website or online shop and turning these visitors into customers. Her website is in German but you can say hello at Facebook.
Does the online marketing world seem overwhelming? The web is so full of SEO advice, tips and tricks that it can seem rather overwhelming for startups and small business owners with limited time and budgets.
What if you could fix some things yourself or on a low budget? These quick tips on optimizing your website require little or no technical skills and most of them can be completed within a very limited time.
1. Keyword Research
What do your customers search for? While you should never obsess about keywords and don’t sacrifice good copy to content stuffed with keywords, it is helpful (and important) to know which terms your audience is using when searching in Google (or Bing). The Google Keyword tool is free to use and it will give you some ideas on how to structure your online shop or website or even which keywords to use in your headlines. (Make sure to select “exact” for more accurate results though.)
2. Title Tags
Now that you know the most important keywords, you should use them in your title tags (in a clever way, do not stuff it with a list of keywords). They’re still important to Google and quick to fix so start here when you optimize your website. Your brand should be part of your title tag but always have your keyword (phrase) at the beginning of the title tag as Google puts more weight on these keywords.
3. Meta-Descriptions
While they aren’t part of the search engine algorithm (read: They will not directly affect your rankings), they’re important for your click rate in the search results. Make your descriptions as appealing as possible so potential customers will click on your result.
Also, a quick note on meta-keywords: They used to be important to Google but that time has passed. These days you can simply ignore your meta keywords but if you *do* use them, please make sure that they’re not stuffed with words (Google thinks that looks spammy and it can hurt your rankings).
4. Headlines and Website Copy
Make sure to include the keywords you want to rank for in your headlines and website copy. H1 headlines are most important but having keywords in your h2 headlines (if you use them) can’t hurt either. Just avoid stuffing them with keywords or making them sound all unnatural.
5. Forget about Google
Yes, really. It’s important to know about what Google likes in websites and what will make you rank higher. But! Don’t obsess about SEO. Your business is still (has always been and will always be!) about your human audience. While it is good to help Googlebot understand your content, always focus on your human visitors. No compromise there!
Of course, SEO can be realllllly complicated and significantly more in-depth than this. But these tips will get you headed in the right direction!
photo by mislav m, cc
Good post! I love the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin for WordPress — as most of my clients maintain their websites on their own once I’m done, a user-friendly, not-scary way to do SEO is important.
Totally second that. WordPress is excellent for SEO anyway and that plugin really makes some basic settings so easy without requiring any scary technical skills.
Google’s Keyword Tool is going away soon and is being replaced by another tool that you have to have an Adwords account to access. Be sure to sign up for Adwords! It’s called the Adwords Keyword Planner.
As an SEO and problogger, I will certainly miss the old Keyword Tool since it was easy to use without having to sign in and out of different manager profiles but the Planner has more capabilities.
I’d say you’re on track with ideas about not obsessing but would venture to say that doing things to game Google or using practices that seem shady (called Black Hat SEO for those non-SEO speakers) is what you really need to avoid.
True. When I wrote the post, it didn’t look like Google would stop their free service but as you said, when you sign up, you can still do keyword research. It’s free and there’s no need to actually use AdWords and spend money on ads. I’ll miss the old tool as well though.
Indeed, people have tried tricking Google for years and it’s still somewhat working for some folks but to play it safe, you should always keep Google’s guidelines in mind. Even if they won’t detect what you’re doing right now, you can bet on them to find out in the future and you want to avoid that as it might cost you rankings or even get you banned from their search results.
Love #5! People in our industry are absolutely obsessed with writing content to match Google’s preference. I say forget about keyword density as Google will pick up on keywords. The most important thing is to write LONG, quality content. Most of the content that makes it to the first page of Google has more than 2,000 words. And finally, becoming even more important is to get more social media shares. The more shares your content gets, the more relevant and popular it will seem to Google.
Thanks for sharing and your image is really cool too!
A simple an powerful thing people seem to often forget when it comes to SEO: alt tags and image file names.
A lot of people search for images on google but the only way google has to figure out what’s on your image is by the alt tag, title tag and the image file name. So if you are adding image1.jpg and giving it no alt tag or title, it will never be found.
You can use all three places to (intelligently) place keywords. Not to mention the added benefit of making your site more accessible for disabled people (alt tags are read by screen readers, used by blind people).
Definitely. People are (finally!) starting to listen to Google who’s been preaching about how to write for real people for years but you can still find lots of insecurity about keyword density or even advice to write according to some magical numbers, no matter how dumb it sounds. I’ve been feeling so tired of “keyword density” for years - not sure if it’s only a german trend but here the “scene” has replaced it with the discussion around a formula that involves “within document frequency” and “inverse document frequency” which is more accurate and more like how Google counts terms but still way too complicated to really use on a regular basis (and you need a tool to calculate the frequencies and find out how high it should be for the different target keywords of your topic). Not sure if you’ve heard of that but it’s quite interesting and it gives a whole new perspective on the old keyword density discussion.
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Great tips Ilga. Everybody expects SEO to be far too complicated but there is no reason why it has to be. This advice is great and it’s good to see someone realising the importance of focussing more on humans than robots.
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According to PR icon, David Ogilvy, your headline can make or break your entire ad. In the case of a blogger, your headline can be the single most important factor on whether it is read or not, as well as being shared.