Lunchtime Learning & Laughing

On Tuesday lunchtime I spent a very jolly 45 minutes talking and learning about Search Engine Optimisation with ?? Emma Pearce , along with a dozen small business owners. I meant to record the session, but forgot! So I have written up a summary from my notes. Please do let me know if I missed anything.

What is SEO??

Search Engine Optimisation is the process by which you help Google (and other search engines) to know what your website is all about. To do this effectively, you need a clear plan of which words or phrases you want to be associated with each page on your site.?

SEO Research

It is recommended that you do some research to learn how specific search terms will perform, and get an idea of how hard it will be get your site high up the Google listings when people search for those words or phrases. . There are some great tool available to do this, and we recommend?Mangools. You can use this tool for free for 5 searches every 24 hours (and a 7 day free trial).?

So for example if you sell lawnmowers, you are unlikely to be first on the list for the leading brand names like Flymo, Bosh, Honda etc. But if you link this to a location or combine the word lawnmower with the brand and the location (Flymo lawnmower in Sussex) - you can research to see how many people in a specific location have searched using that exact term in the past 12 months. It's marketing gold!?

The?Mangools?tool will also suggest similar phrases or words you can think about, and show you how competitive each one is. Brilliant.?

Making use of your search terms

Now what do you do with this new found knowledge? The temptation is to cram several key phrases in to every nook and cranny of each page but... there is this crafty thing called page density. Google has worked out that if a phrase is used too many times, it is not going to be very readable. They know this is something trying too hard! So they look for pages where a specific phrase represents 2% of the word-count. Good practice is to have a minimum of 300 words on a page, so you need to be including your key phrase about 6 times.?

Multiple Pages

The recommendation is that you identify one key word or phase that you associate with each page of your website. So if you have 5 different services, you should create 5 separate pages and use a different search terms for each page.?

SEO Meta Page Headers and Titles

There are two key?SEO fields for each web page that you need to fill in behind the scenes on your website (in your content management system). These form the text that appears on Google search results?listings.

You need to write the SEO title for each page of your website. It is vital that this includes the key phrase and location for that page so Google knows what your page is about.

The page description field could be in sentence format and include benefits of why someone should choose your business (as well as reinforce the key phrase for that page).

Links

Someone asked about reciprocal links, where you include a link to their website on your site and they do the same for you. Apparently that doesn't count for much these days so isn't really worth the effort. But if you can can get sites with strong domain authority to link to you, that will help.?

Adding your site to local directories is a good idea (just search for local business directory). Make sure you add the data in a consistent way, and that means it must be exactly the same (to the letter) as the entry you added to Google My Business.?

Bing

It may be a lot less used than Google but Bing hovers at about 10% of searches made - and is the search engine used Amazon's Alexa. Head to the Bing site to submit your site (here).?

Four more in the series

If you'd like to join us at any of our future Lunchtime Laughing and Learning events, please register here. They are starting again after Christmas.

#SEO

#Marketing

#DigitalMedia