Keyword Research Implementation

Filed under: SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , — Felipe @ 21 Nov,08

On my last post I talked about on page optimisation, with a quick and simple guide of how to optimise on page elements in order to improve the page rankings.

One the first things I mentioned was how important keyword research is prior to the page optimisation, in this post I will give a more detailed explanation of how to perform and implement keyword research in other areas of the search engine optimisation process.

First of all, brainstorm a list of ‘search terms’ related to your business, once you have a list of ‘search terms’ that you are happy with, start the research to discover which keywords are popular (competitive), which ones have the more ‘hits’ and which ones are relevant to your business.

Now you have a list of keywords to optimise your site, it is time to start implementing these keywords on the page and in other areas of your site. It is very important to prioritise your work, I suggest you order the work by Hierarchy, start from the top level pages and work your way through.

When implementing keyword research there are 3 important tasks that need to be followed:

1 – On Page Changes – This on page optimisation walkthrough explain all the on page elements that need to be optimised.

2- Site Architecture and Linking Structure – You need to develop a good hierarchy flow, using the right anchor texts and pointing links to the right pages, this task is always good to be done with the help of a web development team.

3 – Special Cases – Imagine that you added a new page to your site and this page is targeting a really important keyword, you have optimised all the on page elements, but that alone won’t be enough to improve the rankings of that page. For these cases you need to, first point more links from the pages of your to this page using the targeted keyword as anchor text and create some viral content and spread out to see if you get other sites to link to that page using the keywords as anchor text, Articles and blog post are a good alternative here.

To sum things up, one thing that you need to have in mind is the more competitive the keyword the more time and more work will be needed before you start seen improvements in your rankings.

On Page Optimisation Walkthrough

Filed under: SEO,hedgehog digital — Tags: , , — Felipe @ 05 Nov,08

A well planned search engine optimisation campaign should always start with on page optimisation. As the name already suggests, this part of a search engine optimisation will optimise key elements on-page.

To start the on-page optimisation process, keyword research is the paramount of importance. This will ascertain the most relevant keywords related to your site’s theme. Another important factor that should be considered here is the search volume of each keyword you are analyzing.

There are various free keyword analyzing tools available today, with wordtracker, keyword discovery and the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool been the most used ones.

Once you have a list of keywords that you are happy with, it’s time to start implementing those keywords on the right places on your website’s pages.

The most important on page optimisation element are the title tags. The title tag is the first thing search engines robots look at when they crawl a page, and it’s given a very high importance by the search engines so it’s crucial to add you keywords to your title tags.

Another good place to add your keywords is in the meta description and keywords tags, these meta tags are not as important as they used to be, but since search engines normally displays the meta description tags as the text snippet under the link to your site on the SERPs, writing compelling meta description tags can make your site stand out on the SERPs and instigate searchers to click through your link.

Headers are another important element that should be given special attention, search engines give a high importance to headers, especially the H1 headers or H1 tags, adding your keywords to these tags can help improve the rankings for these keywords.

Since the search engines are not good in reading images you will need to use special tags to tell the SE what the image represents, these special tags are called ALT tags. Again an important place to add your keywords and always use a meaningful file name to your images, for instance “dog-playing-with-ball.jpg” is much better than “DC23124.jpg”.

The content or the text of your pages should also be optimised. Optimise your content in a way that suits both your visitors and the search engines. Don’t stuff your content with keywords; try to use synonyms and variations of your keywords. By en-bolding the odd keyword, this also high lights important text to the search engines, once again care must be taken to not look artificial.

With these guidelines we covered more or less all the on-page optimisation elements, if you have any questions leave them below in our comments section and a member of our SEO team will answer it asap.