SEO Search Engine Optimization. A Beginners Guide – Part 2

In Part one of this two part beginner’s guide to SEO Search Engine Optimization, I focused largely on how to optimise your website content to make it more search engine friendly.

In this part, I want to take things a little further by introducing a series of steps which will help you to fine tune and advance your efforts to make your site more search engine visible.

1. Research your competitors

Of course, competitor research is essential in developing any business, but when it comes to SEO, it’s important to take the right tact. 

The first step is to use your keywords as a guide to find your competitors.  You can either do this yourself or employ a third party to generate a report for you.  The next step is to decide whom from the generated list you are going to focus on.

Search Engine Journal suggest there’s no point trying to figure out how an established brand, like Nike, gets to the top of search engine listings, because you’re unlikely to have the same kind of resources they have available.  It’s better by far to identify a few successful websites who have been in your space for a shorter period of time – say 2-3 years. 

Search Engine Journal say this for a number of reasons. 

Competitors more recently into your space will have built their presence using techniques relevant today, some of which you may not know, rather than so called legacy techniques which are out of date.  At the very least you will be able to analyse their on-site SEO Search Engine Optimization: titles, H1 and H2 tags, internal site architecture, and, have fewer back links to work through to work out their link building strategy.

2. Optimised Landing Pages with Calls to Action

The science of ‘landing pages’ merits a whole blog posting in its own right, and yet, for now, it’s important you start thinking about creating them for your site. 

Simply put, Landing Pages are web pages created to be more visible to very specific keyword searches, and act as a funnel to steer traffic to your website, often by bypassing the homepage.  Good landing pages will have clear headlines and text focused tightly on the reader taking one action only.  Contextual links to other parts of your site are also important, because when two web pages in the same site have similar key words, search engines place more emphasis on the page that links the two pages together. 

3. Webmaster Tools

There are a vast range of tools available online which help you to master SEO, but amongst them the following are, in my opinion, essential.  Google Analytics  is a very powerful tool which helps you learn which online marketing initiatives are cost effective and how visitors interact with your site. Key in making the incremental improvements to your site required to drive targeted traffic, and increase your conversions. 

At face value Google Alerts - email updates on the latest content relating to certain keywords – seem to have little to do with SEO, but are very useful for keeping tabs on your competitor’s latest initiatives and also what people are saying about you or your business.

Websitegrader.com is a free SEO search engine optimization tool which uses website traffic, SEO, social popularity, and other technical factors to measure the marketing effectiveness of your website.  

Sitemaps, created using software freely available online, can help the web crawlers which search engines use to index your site more intelligently, and so avoiding the possibility they will pick up a minor sub page from your site, instead of one of the key pages which describe your core product or service. 

By contrast Robots.txt are files which tell web crawlers and other robots, including those created by spammers, which areas of your site they are not allowed to visit and index.   

4) Social networking and social bookmarking

Again another vast subject that I have discussed in some of my other posts, but here I would like to underline their importance in engaging in social networking.  Creating a Facebook page or Twitter account, for example, gives you the opportunity to promote and link back to key new content on your site – links which search engine crawlers may pick up in addition to your site, and help raise your ranking.

It’s also important to consider using one of the many social bookmarking plugins available.  Plugins such as Share This and Addthis make it easy for site visitors to tag or recommend content on your site to social networking sites such as Facebook, and Twitter, but also those others such as Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg and Delicious dedicated specifically to rating articles, blogs and websites.

5.) SEO Search Engine Optimization Software

Finally, Software such as Web CEO  or SEO Elite, can play an important role in gathering all the elements of SEO into one desktop screen, making it easier to co-ordinate your keyword research, search engine submission, link partner analysis, ranking checker, and web analytics. 

I hope you have found this two part series on SEO search engine optimization useful and informative. I would love to hear your thoughts, please add them to the comments section below. Also, if you like what you have been reading why not subscribe to our RSS Feed. Thank you very much.

Related Posts

1. SEO Search Engine Optimization. A Beginners Guide – Part 1
2. Search Engine Optimisation – Top Five Tips for Bloggers
3. SEO Tutorial – Backlinks – Effective SEO Link Building
4. Website Optimization – How To Sustain The Flow Of Traffic To Your Website
5. SEO Keyword Density And Latent Semantic Indexing