The best keywords in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) pose a great challenge to ordinary mortals with regular websites. How can you or I possibly complete for a keyword phrase that gets 100,000 searches per month in Google?

The plain fact is, we can’t. To compete for a top keyword you’ll need…

1. A well-established website with thousands of web pages
2. New unique and original content added daily
3. Content of sufficient quality to pass Google’s human inspectors
4. Thousands of links into your site
5. Links to a variety of pages in your site
6. Links from sites with high PageRank and Trust

Most websites have none of these things, and never will. To make matters worse, most of the “how to do SEO” articles do nothing more than tell you to get all 6 of the above.

So what is a small business owner to do, if s/he wants to get to the top of Google?

I suggest you focus on getting quick wins. There are a number of good reasons to do this, but the main one is that you’ll experience SEO success within 10-20 days. This is especially useful for beginners.

For a start, give up the idea that you’re going to get to page one for a heavily contested search term. Instead, refocus your efforts on keywords that…

• Have a lot less competition (e.g. 1,000 searches/mo)
• Are highly targeted (e.g. battersea dentist versus dentist london versus dentist)

You can probably get to page one for such a term in 1-2 weeks. Once you’ve achieved it, find another keyword and focus on that.

Doing SEO Keyword Research is one of those things that sounds difficult, but is actually very easy. Click the link for a one-page quick-start guide that explains everything you need to know.

Once you’ve settled on a particular keyword, it’s time to optimise for it. The easiest page to get to the top of Google is your site’s homepage. However, if your keyword naturally sits inside another page on your site, optimise that instead.

Content Optimisation is something anybody can do. You can find a brilliant beginner’s guide to SEO on the site I’ve just linked to. It includes links to many excellent guides, tools and SEO resources.

So there it is in a nutshell. Pick an achievable keyword phrase, and focus on getting to page one for that. Then pick another achievable phrase, and apply it to another page on your site. In 6 months time you could rank in the top 3 for 25 keyword phrases that collectively attract 25,000 searches per month.

This is almost certainly more useful than getting into the top 3 for a single keyword phrase that attracts 25,000 searches per month. Why? Because each of your terms will be highly focussed, and take people to a well targeted page designed to receive its own term. This greatly increases your chance of converting a visitor into a lead.

search engine optimisation, seo keyword research

My usual advice on writing for websites is keep it short, keep it relevant, avoid repetition, and make sure key search terms are included in the page copy (as well as the page title, headers, tags, etc). There’s an exception; the FAQs page. That’s where you can relax a little and expand.

Frequently Asked Questions WILL be read by those with real interest in doing business with you (they’ll be read by your competitors too!) Because potential customers come to FAQs seeking answers, you don’t need to worry about crafting words to grab their attention in the first couple of seconds, and convincing them to buy in the next two. You can use more words without boring the reader. You can insert some jargon. You can build in plenty of internal links. You can include a raft of H2 and H3 headers, much loved by search engines. You can cover a single topic from several angles by varying the question. You can include lists – which you’d normally avoid doing. And you can pack in key words and phrases.

Effectively, there’s no limit to the number of FAQs you can pose but, for readability, once you get beyond about ten or twelve, start breaking them into topic groups, to tidy the page visually. Unless an FAQ is deep down technical, limit answers to no more than 50 words or so. If you need many more, consider linking from a summary answer to a sub-page with the full answer in glorious Technicolor.

Many web copywriters regard FAQ’s as a chore. They’re actually a powerful SEO weapon. That’s why, at writeltd.com, we love them.

web copy copywriting FAQ SEO

When it comes to search engine optimisation (SEO), content matters a lot. And not just what content you have, but how much. For example, I created this mini-site for 1st Financial Foundations. It’s purpose is to help people thinking about withdrawing tax free cash from their pension.

Initially, the site had 3 pages…

1. Homepage
2. About us
3. Contact us

The content is optimised for the keyword ‘pension cash’. I created a sitemap, registered the site with my Google Webmaster Account, and waited to see where it would end up in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages).

It ended up nowhere. It appears the competition for that keyword phrase is more organised than I realised. I started working on contextual and non-contextual backlinks, in an effort to get it somewhere in the first 10 pages. No joy.

It seems clear to me the problem is one of content. The site had only 3 pages, and one of those was a contact page. I’m now adding more pages in conjunction with the client. These additional pages focus on particular aspects of pensions (e.g. pension audit, types of pension, pension news).

Over time, I plan to build the site up to 12 pages.

Why over time? I want the pages to appear naturally, rather than all at once. I’ll also continue to build links back to the site. Based on results to date, I think it will be several weeks before the site appears on page one.

It just goes to show, it’s not only about quality. In search engine optimization quantity counts too.

This wedding site also has a content problem. It’s supposed to generate leads, and is highly focussed on wedding reception entertainment. The problem is two-fold…

1. There’s no offer (lead generation requires an offer)
2. The copy is client-centric

When writing copy designed to generate leads, the copy must be about the offer. Not about the company. It’s such a simple concept, yet it’s totally overlooked by almost every website out there.

content, SEO

SWSmiles is a dental practise based in the London suburb of Battersea. The company’s website wasn’t on page one of Google for any of the keyword phrases they were targeting. This included the keyword phrase Battersea Dentist.

There is a surprising amount of competition for this keyword phrase, but not enough to explain why a 3 year old domain hadn’t made it onto page one. In fact, the site was sitting on page seven of Google’s results pages.

Clearly, something had gone wrong.

When I looked over each page on their site, it was clear previous efforts had been made to have the site ranked in Google. The following list shows what had been attempted previously (and hint at why it wasn’t working)…

• All page filenames included the word Battersea
• Every page included a well-stocked keyword list, many including the word Battersea and Dentist
• Every page had the same meta description and keyword list
• Every page had the same title, which consisted of the company’s name
• There were no internal contextual links
• Text on the page didn’t reflect the contents of the keyword list, title or description

Putting this right was a relatively simple matter. For example, if you take a look at the contact page on the SWSmiles website, you’ll find an internal contextual link back to the site’s homepage (i.e. the words ‘Battersea Dentist’ are clickable, and linked to the homepage). This helps to create an association between the keyword phrase ‘Battersea Dentist’ and the site’s homepage.

The key pages on the site now have unique titles, meta descriptions and keyword lists that reflect the actual content on the page. Headings and titles are now coordinated, and build an accurate picture of what each page on the site covers. I used a keyword density program to achieve this (an essential tool in search engine optimisation).

For various reasons, I had to pick my SEO battles carefully on this site. In particular, it was essential to focus on the main keyword phrase. The client wanted more optimisation than was possible, and it came down to selecting a keyword battle we could win. It’s worth noting that this is one area where day-to-day experience with SEO pays off. Anybody can learn the mechanical steps of SEO. It takes time to develop an instinct for the specific area in which a site is likely to gain the most SEO benefit.

I selected Battersea Dentist because it was clear this was a battle we could win. While there is competition, it’s not especially sophisticated. We’ll probably never unseat the number one site (they have the perfect domain for the keyword phrase, and it’s 4 years older than my clients), achieving spot #2 or #3 is entirely reasonable given the constraints I’m working under.

The site arrived on page one with nothing more than highly focussed content optimisation, and a couple of well chosen external inbound links. The goal now is to get into a top 3 spot for ‘Battersea Dentist’. This puts SWSmiles above the Google Local Business map. There are 2 keys to making this happen…

1. External inbound links (including but not limited to contextual links)
2. More content

The cheapest of these 2 tactics is #1, external inbound links. So that’s what I’m focussing on. These will be spread across a series of directories, and other sites. High PageRank sites are not required in this case, which makes the exercise affordable. In fact, I provided a fixed quote for a set number of links.

It’s my normal practise to over-deliver with links, as it’s not always possible to control context, the nofollow attribute, or indeed the SEO value conveyed by any external link.

These links will be delivered over a 4 week period, as link building works best when it’s carried out on an incremental basis.

If the client decides to go for #2 down the tract, there is an obvious candidate to easily and quickly generate more content. This has the advantage of setting up future SEO gains for other potentially lucrative keyword phrases (e.g. teeth whitening). That candidate is the Costmetic Dentistry page, which covers a number of specific dental services…

• Teeth Whitening
• Porcelain Veneers
• Cosmetic Bonding
• Cosmetic Orthodontics
• Botox

From an SEO perspective, these have a better chance of ranking well if they each sit on their own highly focussed page.

seo case study

A Google Sitemap isn’t an ordinary sitemap designed for humans to read. It’s an XML document designed to help Google’s bot index every page on your site as efficiently as possible.

Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask all use the same protocol, so you need only create one XML sitemap.

There are a number of reasons why a Google sitemap is a useful addition to your site…

• Tell Google to revisit your site and add new pages and changes to its index (used in conjunction with a Google Webmaster Account)
• Submit a site to Google for the first time (via a Google Webmaster Account)
• Use it in conjunction with robots.txt to ensure the site is indexed correctly
• Sites that make heavy use of Ajax, Flash and/or Silverlight have a hard time getting indexed correctly. An XML sitemap ensures every page is visited by the bot (page content is another matter)
• Sites with long-winded virtual URLs containing codes and ids can ensure Google indexes them correctly
• Sites with multiple URL formats can ensure Google doesn’t punish them with a duplicate content penalty (in conjunction with robots.txt)
• The sitemap helps Google find pages more than 2 links from the homepage

All things considered, an XML sitemap is a useful thing to have if your site contains a lot of links. Or if your site isn’t being indexed correctly by Google.

The question is, how do create a Google sitemap? And what the heck is XML?

The good new is, you don’t need to know anything about XML to create a sitemap for Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. All you need is this free XML sitemap creator.

You may have noticed some of the benefits of an XML sitemap are best realised in conjunction with a Google Webmaster Account. I recommend you also open a webmaster account, and register your site(s) with it.

A Google Webmaster Account is an excellent way to submit a new site to Google, find out whether or not Google has a problem with your site, and gain access to very useful information about how your site is doing. A webmaster account also links to additional information, services and resources. You can pick up a Webmaster account here.

Once you have a Webmaster account, click the ‘Help’ link at the top of the page. You’ll find everything you need to know in Google’s extensive help system.

google sitemap, Search engines, xml sitemap