Before we actually start optimising the website, we need to make a quick check to see how well it’s currently doing in the search engines. Why? Well we need to see where it’s positioned now, and more importantly, be able to measure any improvements as we make the changes.

If you’re thinking this is going to take a lot of time and effort searching in Google and recording results, then that could be so. But luckily, we have worked out a way to do it that is very quick and easy and takes a fraction of the time.

However, there is something we need to do first.

We need to spend a little time thinking about the keywords for your business or organisation. These are the sorts of keyword phrases someone might enter into a search engine and hopefully find your website.

This is your task – Pretend you’re a potential customer looking for the products or services you sell. What are the most likely keywords? Write down the first few you think of and then try a few searches in a search engine. You should get further ideas from this. Don’t worry about looking for where your site is placed for the keywords, we’re going to take care of that in the next lesson.

Now go back to being the business or website owner and spend a little time brainstorming keyword phrases from that angle. Chances are, as the closest person to the business or organisation, you’ll already have a fair idea of possible phrases. You just need to build on that list.

One important thing: you need to be realistic about keywords.

It is important to be realistic about the keyword phrases you want to come higher in the search engines. For example, say we wanted to get the Razor Edge Media website to come in high for website development related phrases. Achieving first page position for the actual phrase “Web Design” would be extremely difficult if not impossible due to the competition, but getting a high position for related phrases such as ‘web design Braintree’, ‘web development Braintree’ or ‘web design Bishops Stortford’ would be much more possible.

How many keyword phrases are you going to need?

The SEO tool we’re going to use can handle 20, so if you can come up with that many great, otherwise try and get at least 10 if you can. Once you’ve got these, you’ll be ready for Day 2 where we’ll be using this simple keyword tool to see just where your site is placed.

In part 1 we spent a little time getting together a list of relevant keyword phrases. How many did you come up with? 5, 10 or even 20? As long as you’ve got some we can move forward. If you’ve got 20 then that’s great, because that’s the maximum number you can put in the free version of the software we’re going to use.

Now let’s look at the two main reasons we’re doing this:

Where is my website in Google? If there’s one question that we are being asked all the time by our customers it’s, ‘“where is my website in Google?”. Of course, what they really mean is: “where is my website placed in Google for my chosen keywords?” Generally, most website owners want to know where their website is placed in the search engines and what we’re going to do is a good way to find out.

The other thing, with regards to this course and your future SEO on the site, it’s going to be very useful to know where the website is currently positioned, as it will be something to measure future progress against.

As mentioned above, the good news is that this lesson is going to be a lot easier because we’re going to use an online keyword tool to do most of the work for us.

First thing is to access the keyword tool.

Now there are a few decent ones around these days, but one I’ve found offers great value with quality results is called SheerSEO. The biggest benefit (especially for this course) is that you can have a complete keyword position report for up to 20 keywords without needing to commit any money, and it’s free for another 60 days.

With that in mind, let’s get started.

First open the SheerSEO website. You’ll see the title box ‘SEO Software’ and directly under that is a blue box titled: ‘Create SEO report for your website!’ – Now enter your website in the box below. Click ‘Check’ and a new page will open titled: ‘Sign up for Trial’.

Now you’ll see a list of keywords on the page under the heading: ‘Suggested search terms’. SheerSEO has randomly picked these from your website, so they may not be that relevant, but there may be one to two you can use. No worries though, because you’ve got the keyword list you created yesterday, so just drop them in the ‘Monitored search terms’ box and click on the ‘Submit Changes’ button at the end. Don’t forget you can put up to 20 terms in here so if you think of any more add them now.

Now SheerSEO will be gathering information from the search engines on the position of each of the keywords in Google, Bing and Yahoo and put the results in a table.

So the first column of the report shows the search term and the second column shows the position for whichever search engine you choose. You can now look through the results to see how your site is doing, but we’ll discuss that in more in detail tomorrow. However, we are not quite finished yet, there is still one thing you need to do.

Create an account with SheerSEO.

To continue this course, you are going to need to create an account with SheerSEO. Don’t worry you don’t need to pay anything, you get 60 days of free use to monitor the keyword positions (that’s why we like this tool), but you need to do it now as it won’t let you add your website again otherwise.

Having used the SheerSEO keyword tool to get positions on up to twenty of our keywords in the search engines, we now need to use that information to choose the best pages to start optimising and get some initial results.

But why not just pick any page? Or a page we want to come high for, like say the product page? Surely that would make more sense and be more productive?

Maybe so, but things are not quite that simple. It’s all to do with how the search engines see the pages and how we can work with them to get the results we want.

Let’s take a look at what we’re trying to achieve, and how the search engines can help us:

The aim of this short course is to try and boost your website in the search engine, to drive more traffic and hopefully more sales or enquiries in the longer term. In reality, it is not the whole website that is positioned, but several (or many) single pages. In the search engines, some pages on your website do much better than others.

There can be a lot of reasons for this, and more often than not the pages you want to come in high for don’t, and other seemingly less relevant pages will do well, and it can be nigh impossible sometimes to change this. So why not work with the search engine and go with the pages that are doing well so they can do better, and then move onto the more challenging ones later?

So the aim of part 3 is to choose the pages that have the best chance of moving up the rankings, so we can get some worthwhile results as quickly as possible. Then you’ll have a better idea of what’s needed to tackle the more difficult pages.

If you’ve completed Day 2 then it should be fairly straightforward to locate the information we need from the SheerSEO reports we created previously. First login again then look for the last column titled ‘URL in search results’ in the ‘Current Rankings’ report. This lists the page web address that was found for each keyword.

If you’ve got keywords and pages at position 1,2,3 in fact anything up to 5, then that’s great. You don’t need to worry about too much about these. It’s the ones further down we’re going to look at with the aim of trying to move them higher.

So the pages to focus on are positioned further down and the aim of this course is to pick 2 or 3 of the ones you’d like to come higher and focus on those. Ideally, these pages will be placed above say position 25 to 30 as below this will take longer and need much more work.

Now that we have chosen a few keywords linked with pages we just need to check a couple of things so as to be ready for tomorrow’s lesson.

Look at the, keywords linked to your chosen pages, and think of a few closely related phrases, as these will be helpful when you’re optimising the content.

Having researched the keywords, found positions and chosen the pages to start, it’s now time to actually start optimising your web page.

You can find lots of guides and tips on content editing and content marketing. There is a reason for this.

The reason is it can be a very effective way to lift a website in Google. Of course, it’s always worked up to a point, but even more so now, since Google’s been giving more credence to high quality page content.

So the aim is to pick one of the pages you choose in under part 3 and go through a very simple process to optimise it. Because it’s done with content editing you’ll hardly know it’s SEO, in fact, it’s more like content editing with a little (just enough) SEO thrown in.

So the basic concept here is to review the page content and see if you can edit the text to incorporate a relevant keyword phrase, without undermining the value and meaning of the content.

This is actually easier than it sounds for a couple of reasons. First, the vast majority of page content is written without the tiniest thought being given to SEO keywords. Second, as the page topic is related to the keywords, it shouldn’t be that difficult to incorporate them, and still ensure the text is readable.

The golden rule in our view is to focus on content readability and value first, and keywords second. We’ve found it’s often a good idea to make your changes in preview mode, ideally getting someone else to read it, before going live. This helps to ensure it all makes sense.

These changes can be very subtle and often need to be as you don’t want to undermine the value of the text on the page. The idea is to just incorporate enough search keywords to give the search engines the information they need to position the page correctly. Once we’ve done one page you can then apply the same process to other pages going forward.

How long before Google notice the changes?

Google and the other search engines can notice your changes very quickly, as their search bots check pages quite often (sometimes within a day or so). But this does not mean the position will improve as quickly, although sometimes it does.

The best way to know is to keep an eye on the page using SheerSEO, to see how thing improve going forward. As you optimise more pages you should get a better idea of the changes that make the biggest improvements.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow we’re going to look at the much maligned SEO meta tags, to see how they can help improve the page positions.

Now we’re going to look at meta tags and how they can help with SEO.

If you ask five people who’ve briefly looked into using SEO, they might tell you they’ve learnt that SEO meta tags offer little benefit.

This is a common belief, fuelled in part by Google saying they no longer look at the meta keyword tags. However, they do still use the title and description tag, and, as these can appear on the search engine results page, they offer a valuable opportunity to help lift a page in the results.

So how do you go about editing them? – We can install an SEO plugin that will help you see what they currently are and allow you to edit them.

As mentioned above, there are two meta tags that help with SEO and these are the title and description tags. So what are these, what do they do and what’s the best way to edit them?

The title tag

This doesn’t appear on the visible page at all, but the search engines often use it as the active link people can click on, from their results page to visit your website. We’ve found writing it as a headline or question to raise people’s interest often works best at encouraging people to click on the link. It’s best to keep it under 70 characters, so it is not truncated by the search engines.

The description tag

Again, this doesn’t appear anywhere on the visible page, but the search engines can see it. It is as described: a short description of the content on the page. We generally write it a bit like you would an ad about the page content, offering the benefits and a call to action. Generally, you need to keep it to under 20 words so the whole description can appear in the search results.

The Plugin we use is called Yoast and is generally accepted to be the best WordPress SEO plugin and it really helps you understand how thorough you’re being too. It also gives you a character count when you’re editing your titles and descriptions, so you know if you’re going over the amount that Google will display in search results.

Remember that your Meta Description and Meta Title do not need to be the same as the page title or a cut and paste of section of text from the page. They need to contain the target keyword or phrase for the page, but they also need to say something that will encourage a searcher to click on the link!

Check out our SEO page for even more help!