Google Adwords 5 quick tips

With Google being the front door to the World Wide Web it’s vital to get your SEO campaign right. The top spot on Google can get you 55 per cent of all people who searched for that term clicking on your link. The six steps below are to help you build a solid foundation for your SEO campaign and continue to improve on it.

Think about the user’s journey from start to finish. Users typing different search terms will enter your site at different points, so keep each page relevant.

Search queries can be divided up into three types:

Navigational: a query that includes your domain name, brand name, or company name

Informational: where the user enters phrases such as ‘customer publishers’

Transactional: four or five word phrases that identify exactly what they are looking for

Each type of search is relevant at different stages of the user’s journey. It’s important to have presence at each stage of the user’s journey, so understanding the search types is vital.

Once you are happy with your keywords, content and have taken into consideration the user’s journey, you need to get your site indexed by the big search engines. In order for the search engine spiders to search your site effectively and efficiently they require a few simple things:

The most difficult to change are the dynamic URLs. If your site has the option of SEO friendly URLs to mask the dynamics, then use it.

Previously, you had to wait for the search engines to crawl your site. However, now you can upload an xml site map that tells the spiders exactly what to crawl, what not to crawl and when. Once you have created the xml file, label it sitemap.xml and upload it to your website. Put this folder on the top level inline with your home page.

The next step is to tell the search engines where the xml file is in your site. There are a few ways to do this; the simplest is to create a robot.txt file. Again, this will need to be uploaded to the top level within your site. The code within the file should look similar to this: http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml

Now all the big search engines will be able to find your site.

When writing copy for your website do so with people in mind. Although the search engines will find it, if it doesn’t make sense when the user enters the site you’ll see a very high bounce rate.

Choose a few keywords that are relevant to that page and repeat making sure they sit correctly within sentences. Make use of the CSS tags; put your keyword or phrase into the H1 tag; this will let the spiders know what the page is about and give it preference over the rest of your content. Label the other headers with H2, H3 etc, and make sure the main content is tagged with the paragraph tag. You can also use some transactional search terms as well.

The most important part of the page is the meta title (this appears at the top of the browser window). This is what the search engine spiders look at first to discover what the page is about. Don’t repeat the meta titles throughout your site; this won’t help your ranking.

Rule of thumb for meta title: Main page keyword | call to action | brand.

On its arrival in 1998 Google added authority into its algorithm. Other search engines quickly followed suit. The number of high quality links and the number of inbound links from websites to yours measure this.

In other words, the more links and the more users clicking on the links from a recognised website will boost your ranking. To make the most of this, use your keywords or phrase as the links from these sites as this will let the search engines know that keyword/phrase is relevant to your site.

This is by no means a perfect system; if you type in ‘click here’ in Google you will see Adobe is number one. This isn’t because Adobe is relevant to the search term ‘click here’ but because people link to Adobe by using ‘click here’, mainly in order to download the latest Flash player.

Social networking and blogging has become huge over the last few years. This is a great way to build your presence on the web. Join in the conversations, build a profile and tell people about your site – linking to your site from the big players can boost your ranking. Remember to keep your profile up to date and have a story to tell.

If you are looking to boost your organic ranking with search engines why not get in touch: email mike.crook@specialistuk.com

Mike Crook
Web developer