You know how you type a search into Google… Have you ever actually asked yourself how those companies appear first on the page? Appear first on what Google calls search results? Well it’s all to do with relevancy. I’m about to tell you how Google recognises this relevancy and exactly how you can boost your website to the top of those search results.

SEO is the process of improving relevancy for search engines like Google. The best optimised websites will always appear on the first list of search results. By being on this first page, more traffic will be likely to find you amongst the 180 million web pages in Australia alone.

Our experts at Lead Creation use 12 strategies to optimise websites like yours. SEO is a complicated and time consuming process, but right now I’ll tell you 6 of the easier and most powerful strategies that you can implement.

Now I really have to tell you this right here and now. What you cannot and should not ever allow yourself to do is to let yourself get persuaded by designers to try to develop a flashy website full of images. Put designers back in their box because people will never find your site with the stuff they create. For more cost effective marketing strategies check out our website.

Use text appropriately

Understand that Google can only read text. Google send out programs that analyse the text on your page, these are called robots or bots. Websites that are overloaded with graphics and flash can’t be read by Google – therefore they won’t appear in search results.

So the first of our 6 strategies is to use text appropriately. Text must be used everywhere possible. Now you can still have a professional website by loading up images and making it look clean and neat. You can still have backgrounds and professional colours, but whatever you do, don’t overload it with images and flash.

Use keywords

You must be asking yourself how to use that text to target your potential clients effectively and to get the traffic that you actually want. Well, that brings us to our second strategy. You use keywords. You may have heard that term before, but what are keywords? Keywords are what one of your potential clients would put into a search box in order to find you.

There are so many tools out there to find the right keyword, so take advantage of them. Pretend you are one of your clients and imagine what they may type into Google to find you.

Position keywords in the right places

The next strategy here is to use your keywords appropriately. Keywords should be put everywhere in your text, but still keep the fluent flow and feel for your page. The place that will give the most impact is to put your keywords into your Metadata. Metadata are the behind the scenes titles and descriptions for each page. Put appropriate keywords on those pages and you will almost instantly boost your page position in search results. Titles must be kept to a maximum of 65 characters including spaces and descriptions should be kept under 155 characters including spaces because that is all that Google will bother to read.

If you do use an image, you can use alt tags with keywords appropriately. Alternate tags are just another behind the scene piece of data, and they are text that Google can read. It gives images text descriptions.

One of the easiest and most effective places to use keywords is in your titles and body text visible on your page. Google’s programs come through and read all of this text. Your <H1> tags are the most important piece of visible text, followed by <H2>, <H3> and so on, then your link text, bolded, italicised and underlined text and then lastly your body text. Your body text should contain about a 2-5% keyword density.

Linking and anchor text

Our 4^th of these 6 strategies is to use links effectively between sites. If you have a link to you from another site that is relevant to what you do, Google will see this and hence your site will become more relevant. It is better to have more links heading into your site than out of it. But you must wonder how you can do this since you can’t control other people’s sites?

Well the answer is that you can control other people’s sites. What!? Yes, you can control sites such as your own blog, your YouTube posts, social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and so on. Google visits all of these sites too, so why not take advantage of that.

Now as I mentioned before, don’t forget your anchor text. Anchor text is the literal text that you see when you create a link. This means that on your optimised website, you should use a keyword as your link, not the usual ‘click here’ or ‘download now’ links…

Use directories

Using directories is our next strategy. But what do I mean by a directory? Believe it or not Google takes advantage of its own form of ‘Yellow Pages’, and that’s exactly what these directories are. The best of all directories is www.dmoz.com, which Google visits almost once a day. Again you should submit keyword ‘stuffed’ titles and descriptions to these directories; 65 characters for the title, 155 characters for the description including spaces.

Change your content frequently

Now this brings us to our last strategy. Make sure you change your content frequently. Let me tell you, if you are frequently making changes or adding or extending pages, then Google will make sure that it drops by to visit you more often.

Have you ever seen the ‘cached’ link below a Google search result? That shows you what your website looked like the last time Google was there, and that cached result is how Google still sees you now; it’s what they store in their database.

If you change your content, then Google will visit you more often which in turn will make your site more relevant. The more often they visit, the more relevant they see you.

Beware of over-optimisation

You must beware of over-optimisation. If your page doesn’t read well, or if you advertise for something that is irrelevant to what you do, people are more likely to leave your page without taking action. Did you know that Google can actually see this? Yep, Google monitors how long people spend on your page and what they do there. So if people are leaving your page and going elsewhere, Google doesn’t like it.

Learning and implementing SEO does take time, but I will guarantee you that if you do this your search result position will increase. This means that you will get more traffic, more targeted traffic and that also means you will get more potential clients.

If you want to get to page one faster and stay there, see how we can do it all for you – make sure you visit us at www.leadcreation.com.au.