Using Search Engine Optimisation to Generate Leads

When you do search engine optimisation, you are increasing your website’s rank among search engines such as Yahoo, Google and MSN. In Australia, Google is the main search engine with over 80% of the search engine market share. Tests have also revealed that Google searches almost always become either sales or inquiries much more often than searches by other major search engines do. In other words, this means that Google gives you the most high-quality search traffic. This is why you should focus your efforts to optimise on Google.

With a high rank on Google, you’ll normally find that you rank pretty well on the other search engines, too. So, let’s go through a three step process to do search engine optimisation. It’s fairly complex, and many companies spend literally thousands of dollars to get this done for them. However, it’s pretty simple to explain it in this three-step strategy.

Step 1: Keyword Research You need to establish which keywords and phrases are relevant to your product or services so you can focus your SEO efforts accordingly. For many businesses that serve a local area, keyword research is normally straight forward. The most profitable keywords or phrases are likely to be in the form Your Industry Your Location. For example: “Plumbers Melbourne”, “IT Support Sydney”, “Accountants Perth”. There are also a range of keywords and search tools, including a free tool; inventory.overture.com and also more sophisticated pay tools such as wordtracker.com and keyworddiscovery.com.

Step 2: Optimising on Page Optimise your webpage content. For the best search engine optimisation and rankings, you have to make sure that the right keywords appear on your webpages. This is part of the story, true, but it’s just part of what you have to do to optimise your webpages. Here are some other things you should do to make sure you optimise effectively.

1. Your Page Title Should Be Keyword-Rich. The title that appears in your browser in the blue bar at the very top should have keywords in it; this is because it’s also the title in Google’s search results. Make your title concise, short, and rich in keywords. It should have the most important keywords at the front of the title. As an example, if your carpet installation business is located in Sydney, you can say, “Carpet Installation Sydney - Install Carpet Surry Hills Sydney.” And put the most important keywords at the front of the sentence. You can see that it’s a bit of repetition, but it’s pretty keyword rich and it doesn’t sound too strange, which should get you more exposure.

2. Your Description Should Be Keyword Rich. The description is also called the “meta description tag.” This is part of your website code and describes the page’s content. Write descriptions in complete sentences and make them keyword rich. For the carpet installation service in Sydney, for example, it could read something to the effect of, “Surry Hills, Sidney Carpet Installation. Installing Carpet at a Reasonable Price.”

3. What Do Your Headings Say? Search engines look at your headings because they seem to include important page content. If your headings and sub headings are rich in keywords, you’ve given yourself a good start. For example, you can say, “Carpet Cleaning Services in Sydney.”

4. Address Your Page Content. You should ensure that you have at last one keyword rich paragraph of text on each page. Keywords used in your headings may be repeated again in you content. Try to use a mix of related key phrases. For example, Digital Printing, On Demand Printing, 60 minute Print Service rather than the same phrase over and over again.

5. Look At Links. Links are another important indicator of page content. You should avoid generic words and links such as, “Find out more” or “Click here”. Instead, use keyword rich link test such as, “View our complete range of digital printing services”, with “digital printing services” as a link.

Step-3: Off Page Optimisation Off-page optimisation, or linking strategies, is the third and final stage. Every incoming link to your website is considered by Google as a vote for your website content by other websites. The reason why many businesses SEO efforts fail is that they focus exclusively on using keywords on web pages but they lack a linking strategy. Here are a few tips to start pushing your site up the ranks through linking strategies:

1. Encourage Keywords inside Your Incoming Link. For example, if you arrange for a client or supplier to link to your website, you want to ask them to use keywords such as: “cheap digital printing services” in a link rather than your company name, or “Click here”.

2. Consider Using Authority Directories. When you list your site on website directories that are well regarded by search engines, this can improve your rankings. These are so-called “authority” directories and sometimes charge a fee to list there. This keeps out lower quality websites. Three of the most well-respected are botw.org, Yahoo.com.au, and business.com. It should be noted that this is different than using e-mail scams that offer to submit your site are uniformly directors for a fee. Rather, you’ll want to submit your website to directories that search engines regard highly.

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