I doubt that I need to convince anyone nowadays that search rankings do matter.  And just for the ‘newbies’ learning about this topic, search engine optimisation is the tool used to improve your website’s organic search results.

There are many factors that influence your search rankings.  Some you have easy control over, e.g. your website content, and some you have less control over e.g. the age of your domain name.

So for the purpose of this article, let’s talk about what you can control – your website content.  And this includes your ‘on page’ content (what you see when you land on a web page) and your ‘off page’ content, these are referred to as your meta tags, with the two key ones being your Title and Description meta tags.

Key Points to Keep in Mind with Regards to Your on Page Content

• With regard to the products or services you are selling, it’s important to do some initial keyword research to identify the most popular search phrases prospective customers would type in to Google, when doing online browsing for your kind of product/service.
• Once you have an idea of the range of keyword phrases, across all your products or services you offer, it will influence how you handle your website navigation, and how you split your website content across dedicated key topics/search phrases.  With this level of consideration, it means you can move towards having single topic dedicated search phrases, spread in a manged way across your range of web pages.
• For each web page, using keyword phrases in the heading text and on page general body text assists with SEO.  There are a few tricks that can go with this, to enhance the strength of optimising for keyword phrases.  But the key thing is understanding that the use of text and keyword phrases are highly linked for SEO purposes.
• When including the keyword phrases into your general page text, it’s important to not over populate these phrases, as Google may see this as ‘keyword stuffing’.  And this is strongly disliked by Google.  So using them to a level is good, overusing them to an intensity moving towards ‘keyword stuffing’ can be to the detriment of your website performance.
• The key thing to keep top of mind, is even with the task of blending in keyword phrases, the final version of the copy still needs to be appealing and interesting to your prospective customer.  It’s the horrible task of developing web copy that blends the two aspects of meeting SEO requirements combined with developing strong, enticing, sales centric website copy.  As the primary purpose of your website is to achieve sales, either directly from the website (if it is a shopping cart/e-commerce website), or as a lead generation tool i.e. to entice the customer to contact your business.