SEO, or search engine optimisation, is far from being a new method of online marketing. As long as search engines have indexed pages there have been Webmasters and marketers attempting to optimise their pages in order to appear higher in the search engine rankings. The benefits of good SEO are well documented and they boil down to a steady stream of highly targeted and extremely active website visitors. However, if you’re just starting out in SEO or you want a refresher there are certain factors you should bear in mind with every SEO strategy.

Keywords

Before you can begin planning your website content and promoting your pages, choosing the most profitable and advantageous keywords is critical. Targeted keywords that are used by the type of people you are aiming to attract will inevitably lead to visitors that are in tune with the message you purvey. However, keywords that are too popular can be very difficult to rank highly for, and it will certainly take several months or even years for SEO on single word keywords to come to fruition.

Access

The spiders, as well as the resulting visitors, need to be able to quickly access all of the components of your web pages. While we, as a whole, are becoming more inclined to use Broadband and high speed Internet, slow page loading times can still cripple a website by generating excessive bounce and close rates.

Navigation

As well as considering external access to your pages you must also provide accurate and reliable internal access. The navigation from one page to another may not be an area of web development that you initially considered as a stage in the SEO process but it is. Search engine spiders and visitors can easily become lost in a site that has poor navigation that is difficult to follow. Text is best especially because it allows the addition of keywords in anchor text and providing a sitemap alternative is also good SEO practice.

Optimised Content

Once you’ve conducted your keyword research you should be left with a handful of keywords for each of your pages. You should also add semantically related keywords as well as Search Engine Presumed Synonyms in order to help improve the natural flow of the content; this benefits your site visitors and it indicates to the search engines that your site is naturally filled with relevant content.

Links

Each search engine uses different algorithms to determine the sites that will rank well. While the exact contents of these algorithms are unknown it is known that they all consider the number and quality of links that direct to your pages. As well as counting the overall number of links, search engines will give greater weight to relevant links from authoritative websites that use relevant keywords as anchor text.

An SEO Strategy To Combine All SEO Factors

The best SEO campaigns do not rely on a single method of promoting a website; search engines use many different factors to rank a page and every one of your pages should be optimised in each of these ways. By ensuring that a page is fully optimised and that you continue the SEO process you can also help ensure that you continue to retain and build on the rankings you have while continuing to build the number of visitors you receive.

Related posts:

1. Does Your Site Navigation Offer Direction?
2. Is Your Web Design Search Engine Optimisation Friendly?
3. SEO Sitemaps and How They Benefit Search Engine Optimisation
4. Helping Search Engines See The Quality In Your Site
5. SEO For Non Textual Based Content

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.