SEO or Search engine optimisation can seem like a difficult and technical area when starting your web marketing journey. Using the services of an SEO expert can be expensive but to be honest you can save yourself a ton of cash by doing a few basic things.

SEO is a vast topic and you will take a long time to be an expert but by following this guide you can optimise your site effectively and improve your traffic figures greatly.

Put simply SEO is the process of making your pages more focused, so the search engines are clearer what your page is about. There is nothing sinister about this technique, in fact it is fully approved by search engines as long as you don’t take it too far by trying to spam them with ‘black hat’ techniques or irrelevant content.

Backlinks From Other Sites

Search engines love links, it’s the backbone of the internet. The more links back to your pages the better as long as they are relevant to your content.

i.e. your site is about web design so links from sites about seo, photoshop and css are perfect. More general stuff is great too e.g. business, marketing and computers. Links from a site about motorbikes is not relevant so less useful as it makes your page topic unclear.

The actual ‘anchor text’ used by the linking page is also important. When you create great content that people want to link to, they will use text like ‘I found this great article about [website seo]‘ (where [ ] is the part they put the link) so search engines use this anchor text as a description of what the page is about. Links that have anchor text relating to your content are the best way to build your ranking.

Note – If you have contacts on other sites you can ask them to link to your page, just make sure they use different anchor text so it appears more natural.

Using Keywords

Writing valuable, informative articles is the cornerstone of any great site but with a few small tweaks you can make your writing much more effective. Before starting a new article take some time to research what keywords people are searching for (the google keyword tool is great for this) and base your content around this.

The keywords should be placed at regular intervals throughout the body of your article to 5-10% density (if you can without making it unreadable). It should also be placed once in the heading of the article. Don’t go crazy here though, the article still needs to read well, users will just click away if it does’t interest them and search engines don’t like keyword stuffing either.

Alternatively articles you create can be submitted to article directory sites where you can choose which anchor text is used in the links to your site.

Relevant Domain, Meta Tags and URL

To add to the overall website SEO using a domain related to your topic is important. So if your site is about indian monkeys www.indianmonkeys.com is perfect as it contains your chosen keywords. You can add the keywords in the URL i.e. the filename of your page. If your page is about ‘brown indian tree monkeys’ a page named brown-indian-tree-monkeys.html is great as the full url would then be www.indianmonkeys.com/brown-indian-tree-monkeys.html. It needs to be relevant but don’t overdo the keywords and categorise the site clearly for easy navigation.

Meta tags reside in the HTML code of your page. They are less important these days but you should still place your keywords in the title, keywords and description tags, making sure it is human friendly to read.

Basic website SEO is easy, if you do just these three things you will see great results in your traffic and conversions.