Many clients ask me what I do to achieve excellent SEO results for my SEO Clients, so I thought I would write an article on effective, ethical techniques that I use. Some SEO firms may disagree with me, but the results speak for themselves and as long as my customers are happy, I’m happy.
Use Common Sense, not Algorithms.
Many SEO firms like to tell their clients how clever they are because they KNOW the latest algorithms released by the major search engines. Well, I hate to put paid to this fantasy, but search engines don’t release their algorithms. They will never fully understand exactly how to make the most of it, nor will they be able to constantly adapt to changing algorithms without billing the clients for all that time.
What will win the day is just old-fashioned, tried and true common sense. If it makes sense, do it.
So here’s the lowdown on factors that are important to improving your search engine rankings.
Domain Names
Domain names play a big part in SEO. It makes sense to choose a domain name that is both a) relevant to the region and b) relevant to the search terms. For example, if I was registering a domain name for a kitchen supplier in Brisbane, Australia, I would be inclined to pick a domain name that reflected the business and the nature of the business and the location of the business (such as PICKARDSKITCHENS.COM.AU…. where the business name is Pickards, the business type is Kitchens and the location is Australia). Sometimes it pays to use a generic domain, but often it will confuse potential customers too much (for example, KITCHENSBRISBANE.COM.AU may be too generic because it doesn’t identify the business behind the domain name).
Title Tags
Your home page title should contain keywords that relate to your core business, and should be repeated within the heading of your page. For example, Pickards Kitchens Brisbane, or Kitchens in Brisbane by Pickard will list a lot better than if you just made your title Pickards Home Page. Put different titles on different pages so that each page is first defined by the title (for instance, an inquiry form title might read ‘Pickard Kitchens Brisbane - Inquiry Form’).
Keywords/Description/Abstract Tags
Some SEO firms don’t believe that major search engines pay any attention to these tags. Some do. At the end of the day, it takes next to no time to put them in, regardless. As long as your keywords, description and abstract are also included in the content of the home page, then this is not a wasted process. We usually recommend that the description and abstract tags are repeats of each other, and the keywords tag is a repeat of those tags but with commas put in at every available opportunity. Try and put your 5 most important keywords in the tags, and don’t make the tags too long. Put the most important keyword first.
Next Week, we will be dealing with the Content of each page.