The (very) basic building blocks of a strong online presence

It’s Christmas in July, and what better way to celebrate the somewhat bizarre festive season than with these little gems, which will ensure that your website stands out from the crowd in the congested search engine wilderness. Without too much of an introduction then, let’s jump right in.

Keyword research
Probably the most important aspect of building a strong web presence is ensuring that your website is targeting the correct key phrases. Here, there are three things to consider. Firstly, that the key phrase is a popular and searched for term ie: it wouldn’t be sensible to focus your accommodation website around the term “luxury Wynberg villa” if there is no demand for it.

Secondly, that the key phrases are related to what your website is offering ie: “cape town accommodation” may be a highly searched for term, but it wouldn’t be applicable to your Garden Route tour operator website.

And lastly, to weigh it up against the competition ie: “Cape Town guest house” may be a great term, but there are eight million competing pages on Google.

There are some great keyword research tools out there, including Keyword Discovery, WordTracker as well as the Google Adword Tool. These programmes will give you an indication of historical search trends, as well as helping you come up with alternative phrases you may not have thought of, so go through these carefully and come up with as comprehensive a list as you can. The best way to do this is probably to whip out the old Excel spreadsheet and list all the phrases in consideration, with columns for the various programmes you are making use of. Once you have a long list of terms, go through your selection and carefully select your main keywords, secondary keywords etc.

Implementing these keywords
Once you have these keywords, it then comes down to implementing them within your site. Remember, each one of your website pages is a potential entry point for a user. In a perfect world, someone searching for “red widgets” on Google would arrive at the “red widget” page on your website, rather than the “blue widget” page, so these all need to be optimised accordingly.

Generally, pages should be optimised for one to two main key phrases; anything more than that and you should probably look at creating an additional page focusing on those extra terms. In terms of implementing the keywords, the title tag is probably the most important area to look at. As an example, let’s say you had a page focused on the phrases “online florist” and “cape town flower seller”, you could then have a title tag of “Online Florist Cape Town Flower Seller”. The meta description and meta keyword tags have little to no effect on proceedings. The meta description tag will be what is displayed below your link on Google however, so just ensure that it’s concise, clear and easy to understand.

Also ensure that you have a header tag (an < h1 > tag) on the page which includes one of the phrases, and ensure that they are also mentioned in the copy. Many people carefully scrutinise the keyword density of the phrases in the copy. (Basically how many times the promoted key phrases are mentioned in the text of the page). It’s not really a science, just ensure that it’s mentioned near the beginning of the page, again somewhere in the middle and usually at the end as well.

Make sure that the copy reads naturally though; there is nothing worse than web copy that is written with search engine crawlers in mind.

Link time
Once you have implemented your key phrases, it’s time to build some links. There are many ways of building links for your site — some good, some bad, and some which are downright awful — and this subject could well be a whole article on its own. The important thing to remember here though is that the websites you are getting links from must be relevant to your site. If your website sells plasma television screens, it’s pointless and rather silly then to have tour operators from Vietnam linking to you. You will not derive any benefit from these types of sites. Don’t just have links pointing to your home page either. Remember that search engine traffic means that users could arrive on any number of your pages. Build links for various sections of your website, using different phrases. Using the example of the “Online Florist Cape Town Flower Seller” page, get links pointing here using the phrases “Online Florist Cape Town”, “Cape Town Flower Seller”, “Cape Town Florist” etc. Mix and match them, for best results it needs to appear as if these links have been built naturally.

In summary, although these were fairly basic introductions, they represent the core functions for a successful Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign. We could of course also have gone into other aspects such as usability, using clean code and other search engine marketing methodology, but following the above should get your website on the right track.