This guide will hopefully give you a little insight on where to start with your SEO. Search Engine Optimisation, SEO for short, means making your website friendly to the robots that are sent out by the major search engines. If they find a nice, smooth ride and like what they find – they will reward you.

Optimising your website is one of the single most important things that you can do to get your site into the organic search results. The organic search results are the ‘non-paid’ for results that appear after you have entered your search request. On Google, they appear all down the main page with the exception of a couple of sponsored ads at the top – though there are not always sponsored ads there.

Down the right-hand side of the page, you will see the sponsored results. These are from people using Google Adwords to promote their business. Their ad will have come up because one or more of the keywords matched your request. You want to be in the organic search as it’s where most customers click through and it’s FREE for you to be there.

In this part one of SEO basics, we’ll look at what you can do to your website to make your website search engine friendly before going on to what you can do externally in part 2.

What you put into your ‘title tags’ is one of the most important and influential factors in determining when and where your page shows up in the organic searches.  You can actually notice a difference in your search engine placings within 36hrs with Google – just by optimizing your title tags. Imagine changing one word or phrase and moving from page 3 on Google to page 1 for some of your main keywords. That could mean a 50-75%+ rise in sales.

The title tag looks like this in your html <title>words to describe go here</title>. This is the title of your website if you like. The real key to the initial contact and ranking on a search engine – don’t ignore them or leave them blank. You will probably need to play around with various key phrases here and don’t overstuff or you’ll get penalized for spamming. So, to give you an idea if you run an Aromatherapy site you might choose the following;

<title> Essential Aromatherapy Oils – Massaging Aromatherapy Oils – Healing Aromatherapy Lotions</title> This would cover a few options, doesn’t spam and will likely fair you well. Of course, I know nothing about this trade and that was an example and an aromatherapist would choose accordingly. Have a look at what your competitors are up to. What words are they using?

If you want to check out the competition, put in a couple of main keywords for the products you are selling and compare the top 5 on the organic searches. How did they get there? What title tags are they using? To have a look at their title tags you need to ‘right click’ on their home page and then click on ‘view source’. This will bring up all of the info for their home page and towards the top you will see what they have used in their title tags.

I wouldn’t suggest you use the same, but a variation would be good. Also, the key phrasing I showed you isn’t widely used as a lot of people don’t realize how well it works and tend to put an actual title in or nothing at all.

….and MONITOR THE RESULTS – this is the key to any SEO that you embark on. If a certain keyword or phrase is working for you – change it. That one simple change may make all the difference. Make sure you get some tracking software that lets you know what keywords people are using to find you and also what they are doing on your site when they get there. Try Google analytics – it’s free and it’s great.

This doesn’t mean thinking of every-single-possible-word-that-relates-to-your-product-and-putting-it-into-a-great-long-monotonous-meta-tag-list. It’s actually quite old skool now and no-one ever really did it right anyway, well no-one except the SEO dudes. Yeah, by all means put some keywords in your meta tags but many sites do well without them. You’ll find them in-between tags that look like this <meta keywords> you’ll also see <meta content>.

What’s really important in the searches right now is your keyword density. You’re looking for a nice density of at least 2% on your major keywords – this is easier said than done as your first priority is making it pleasing to the customer. If you are confused what this means take this as an example; let’s assume that this article is 500 words and I want to maximize it for the search engines. Well it’s about SEO and I’ve mentioned SEO a lot so that’s good but is it good enough? If I’ve written 500 words and mentioned SEO only 5 times then that would be a keyword density of 1% - which isn’t great when that is my main focus – so maybe I could revise it a little, without changing the natural flow of words but still be able to mention my target word of SEO a few more times.

Now obviously that was an example and when you are selling a product it’s far easier. You want excellent content with no padding. Don’t put a huge long-explanation down if it isn’t needed. You’ll dilute your keywords and bore your customer!

All of the keywords on the page will be taken into account from the headers, to the alt tags to the body content. So think before you write that title – is it containing your keywords?

Alt tags are a great way to get some extra whammy into your SEO. Alt tags are tags that describe your images. This means that when you hover your mouse over an image some extra text appears describing what the image is. I’d recommend you use this technique if you’re not already. Some people in e-commerce will have all of this done for them if they have a good host.

So you now have a nice user friendly and Googlebot friendly page. As I mentioned before don’t spam – googlebot is a sophisticated piece of kit and it doesn’t eat spam!

Don’t underestimate the power of an internal link. When Google looks at your site it doesn’t look at it as a ‘whole’ it looks at each page as an individual page and will rank it so. Yes – most sites will have a home page that ranks highest but that is mainly because it is your main domain and all other pages are like sub domains. For example you would have www.homepage.com and then www.homepage.com/product so it will always be your home page that gets the most attention.

You can still generate back links around your site by linking from one place to another. This isn’t just to get the bot round easier (though it helps) it’s normally crucial as you may want to bring the customers attention to something else they might like.

A good example and use of this is at the bottom of a product page. Let’s say you are selling a childs outfit in yellow and it is also available in other colours. Here is the product title ‘Girls 18-24mnths Sleepsuit. Yellow, 100% Cotton with Satin Trim’. What would you put at the bottom of the page?

This is also available in other colours?

This is also available in pink, green and blue?

Would you link to the products;

This is also available in pink, green and blue?

NO! No, no, no, no, no……..No to all of the above! You are wasting your internal link system – I may have to cry if you are doing this!!

Okay – here’s what you do;

Also available in this range;

Girls 18-24mnths Sleepsuit. Pink, 100% Cotton with Satin Trim.

Girls 18-24mnths Sleepsuit. Green, 100% Cotton with Satin Trim.

Girls 18-24mnths Sleepsuit. Blue, 100% Cotton with Satin Trim.

These would be your links. When you make your title for anything – put your most important word first and then follow in order of importance. I don’t sell girls clothes so maybe ‘girls’ wasn’t the best choice – you decide when you do it yourself. Most important keywords 1^st – if and when it’s possible.

This internal use of linking will not only make it user friendly (more sales), robot friendly for the search engines it will give you a better chance in the organic searches. Anyone searching for the above item will not only have that info on every title for that product – it is repeated at the bottom of the page to the products of the same colour. This link will be the actual page they land on which is great for your bounce rate!

Ok – that’s about it for some simple things that you can start to do for your website. Next we’ll look at what you can do externally for your SEO.