SEO

Gympie SEO Course

This post interrupts our SEO series of articles (they will be continued next time), to bring you a summary of the seminar held in Gympie today.  The “E-Commerce” seminar sponsored by the Dept. of Employment, Economic Devlopment and Innovation was delivered by Peter Dowse of Marketplan and focussed on SEO and delivered good advice on basic search engine optimisation for small busineses.

In a nutshell, this seminar emphasised the importance of:

• selecting the right keywords for your domain name and website content
• having Title and Description metatags for each page and that they include your keywords; and
• continuing to build your website to enhance site value for your potential customers and Google.

To summarise the presentation;

1. You should have your own domain name and website – a single page website in someone else’s website is only really of value to that site owner.
2. Your website should be developed in “Open Source” e.g. standard HTML or WordPress for Content Management Systems (Do not lock yourself into a developer who uses a proprietary system like Microsoft Dotnet as you will have major problems and costs if you need find someone else to help with your website or even change hosting.  Ask your developer what system he uses and whether you can engage others to help you with the site if required)
3. Your domain name should include your main keyword where practicable and it may be worthwhile including a geo-location e.g. a domain name like www.gympiewebsites.com.au informs people that the business is about building website in the Gympie region.
4. Register additional keyword rich domains and redirect these to your website – I strongly disagree with this stategy as various sources write that Google does not index redirected domains. Redirected domains present duplicate content in the index and probably won’t be listed unless the domain owner does more work obtaining backlinks to, and promoting the redirected domain URL.
5. You can use free tools Wordtracker and Google Keyword Tool to identify keywords to develop your website. Google Suggest is also useful for obtaining ideas for new relevant articles to build into your website.
6. Attract customers by using the right keywords in your website contenet – focus on “buyer” keywords rather than broad match keywords e.g. “wordpress website developer in Gympie” instead of  “website designer“
7. Write content to outline benefits (incorporating your kewyords) rather than product features
8. Make your order/contact process easy – have your phone number and email address on each page
9. Search engines look at text and code only – they can’t “read” images, Flash or frames sites.
10. Use keyword anchor text and have “deep” links to internal pages in content
11. Create HTML and XMl sitemaps and submit to Google
12. Title Tag and Description requirements
13. Website success requires work – the addition of new pages (not just updating content on existing pages) will result in more frequesnt searchg engine indexing and better placement in search results
14. Review site statistics to identify search terms p[eople use to find your site (use Google analytics).
15. Use keywords in anchor text for backlinks to your site and internal links in content to other content pages

Conclusion

The presentation gave a reasonable overview of basic SEO steps that a site owner can implement to enhance seach results positioning.  The simple message is identify your market and use keywords they would use to find your website/products in a search engine and then continue adding new pages based on the keywords to your website.  However, the seminar did not cover all on-page factors and page structure but we had this scheduled for our next article which shouldn’t be far away.  It must also be remembered that the presentation was limited to SEO and did not include the more important aspects of Search Engine Placement through website promotion apart from touching on submitting your site to free directories and asking site owners who have mentioned your business for backlinks.  We will cover link building startegies in a later article.

We strongly recommend using WordPress as a content management system for your website as it takes care of a lot of the above issues and makes adding new SEO optimised pages and content easy.  There is some knowledge and work required in setting up the initial wordpress website with optimal plugins but once the site is done, the owner can just login and add a new content within the SEO optimised framework.

Contact us at admin@cooloolabusiness.com if you would like a quote on converting your current website to WordPress.

PS we will continue with the second part of Gympie SEO article series (On page fators and page structure) in the near future and in the meantime, you should check your website against the advice above and make sure your website has individual title and description tags relevant to the content on the respective page.