Organic Search Engine Optimization: Part 2

This is a guest post by Bart Schelfhout of Boza Solutions, a web and software development company with offices in Belgium and London.

In Part 1, we looked at what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) actually is, we examined the differences between organic and paid search results and we looked at how to make sure the pages of your website are optimized. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, do that first.

Now you think your site structure is acceptable, how do you get the indexing by a search engine started? The best way for this is to create a Google webmaster account (this is really easy if you already have a Gmail account) and register your website through the webmaster tools by placing a verification code in your website header. The webmaster tool will allow you to upload an XML sitemap into the system, helping your site to get indexed faster and easier. There are plenty of sites where you can enter your URL and those sites will create the XML sitemap. I’ve found that http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ works quite well.

In the Google webmaster tools you will also find a section for inserting / creating a robot.txt file. In this file you can specify which folders should be accessed by the search engine spider. Say you have a folder containing some images that you use for your website layout. The last thing you want is to have these images show up in a Google image search. That’s why you should protect this folder and disallow the spider access to it.

Now you know the structure of your site is good, but for which keywords and/or keyword phrases do you want to appear on the SERPs?

I found it best to always select a primary and secondary keyword phrase, and make sure these appear in the meta tags (keyword and description), page copy, title tags and file name / URL as much as possible. Remember, the higher in the page that your keyword phrases occur in your body text, the better.

In your HTML header section, you have the possibility to insert a meta-description and keywords. The meta-description has to describe in short what the visitor can find on this page. This will be displayed under the link on the SERP (see figure 1) and ideally should not contain over 160 characters. Make sure the primary and secondary keyword phrases are present in this description. In the keyword section you can enter as many keywords as desired, separated by commas, but ideally you do not want more than 7-8 keyword phrases in there. Make sure each page has a different set of keyword phrases and meta-descriptions, as each page clearly contains different information.

Figure 1: Meta description

Another effective step to directing relevant traffic to your site is linking. Having other websites with topics relevant to yours link to your website does half the work for you. Why? Simple, you already know that these visitors are relevant (they are coming from a site with a relevant topic remember?), thus increasing the chance for a goal conversion (either selling a product through your website or having people complete a contact form) dramatically. Having other sites link to your site also increases your ranking on the Search Engine Results Page, as your site will be associated with the keyword phrases displayed on the website linking to your site. Careful, make sure the link displays on relevant topic pages. If the Google spider decides this is not the case, this might negatively affect your ranking or might even result in your website not appearing at all in the search results (more on that later).

That’s it for Part 2.  In Part 3, we’ll be looking at some of the more unconventional techniques for increasing your search ranking.