Once you have identified your main keywords then its time to use them. Making sure that your main keywords appear consistently in all your online marketing will help to maximise your campaigns.

Optimising your website
This is a technical area. For some people websites are just attractive windows that consumers will enjoy visiting and hopefully engaging and purchasing from. In reality website construction needs the involvement of people who know about search engine optimisation. Keywords need to be embedded in:

• title tags
• headings
• links
• the website navigation system
• document titles, directory names, file names
• the body text

Optimise all your digital output
Use keywords when labelling your videos, audios and all images. These are all included in many search facilities and are becoming more and more popular with the general public.

Social networking
Use your keywords in all your social networking. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, they all allow you to bookmark tags (your keywords) which make it easier for people to find you. This is particularly important now that search engines are using live search results.  Even posts on online forums have search facilities.

Back Links
Using your keywords in links that go to your site is very important as the search engines take this as one very important indication of the usefulness of your site to the readers. Building up good back links takes time, be patient.

Press releases
Use your keywords in everything you put out there including press releases, emails, articles, bio’s. It all counts because it makes it easier for people to find you.

Documents
Optimise any documents you have online with keyword content: pdf’s and word documents can all be used in search engines.

Think in terms of keyword optimisation for every piece of material you produce and you won’t go far wrong.

Inbound links can really help you get good natural search rankings for your website. There are hundreds of ways in which you can achieve this. Here are a few ideas for your link building campaign:

Fantastic content
Yes, fantastic content itself will eventually create natural inbound links to your site. If you are writing unique and unusual content and its what people want to hear about then your information will eventually pick up an audience. The search engines will rank it well and a regular audience will boost the rating.

Social Networking
Participating in social networking can raise awareness about your company and what it does. Extra links from sites like LindedIn, Facebook and Twitter can provide valuable traffic.  Many social networking sites allow people to search for content with particular keywords.

Blogging
Having a well frequented blog with lots of audience participation can create the desire to find out more about your company. Make it easy for visitors to find your site.

Participation
Participating in online discussions with other bloggers and in online communities can help to feed traffic to your own site. Don’t leave a message without leaving your website or blog details. Equally, genuine communication only is valuable in these circumstances. Leaving links just for the sake of it looks phoney and will not encourage traffic – it will just waste your time.

Capitalise on all your marketing
Submit your blog posts to blog directories. This increases your blog audience which you can then direct to your website.

Online video
Creating online video enables you to have another type of media and audience to link back to your site.

Link Swapping
Swapping links with other site owners can increase the number of inbound links to your site but it is important to choose relevant sites to appear on your site. The sites you link to need to be relevant to your readers.

Article submission
Interesting articles with your details attached to the end can hold links back to your site or blog. Article sites are always happy to get good content to fill their pages.

Find out
Find out who is already linking to you. Often this uncovers sectors that are interested in your work that you didn’t even know existed. You can pursue this avenue by finding out where your audience ‘hangs out’ and targeting them there

Quality links
At all times be aware that it’s not just inbound links that are important, they need to be good ones. The best ones have your important keywords in the hyperlink text as part of the link back.

Blogging is one form of social media marketing that can enhance your company. But why and what is the best way to go about it?

The Why?

A shop window
By providing a platform via which your customers can get to know you and your products and services. Like your website, its another shop window but one that is ever changing and dynamic.

Creating links to you website
Blogs can help you to create inbound links to your website. Search engine’s like inbound links from authoritative and content laden sources. If your blog is rich with useful information for your visitors then the search engines will treat links from there as ‘good’ and they will help you to increase your search engine ranking. Creating inbound links is a big part of search engine optimisation so if you are serious about your ranking in the search engines then a blog will definately help.

Communication
Blogs that allow comments from its readers enable your audience to communicate with you. This can provide useful feedback for your company.

Advertising
Advertising your products on your blog and linking straight to them on your website will provide extra traffic for your shopping cart. A good blog can generate lots of traffic and enable you to increase sales directly.

The How?

Posting often and regularly
It is important to post often and regularly when it comes to blogs. ‘As often as you can’ is probably the best phrase to have in mind when it comes to blogging.  Its also important not to leave large gaps between posts.

Great content
Your blog posts have to be informative or interesting or funny (or all three). But seriously, keeping good content going is the most important thing. When you are writing, just think about your target audience. What would they like to hear about? What would they find interesting? What are their interests?

Keywords
Use your main keywords and keyphrases to enable the search engine robots to search through your writing. Optimising your blog for the search engines is important if you want to rank well.

Write naturally
Search engines are looking for natural patterns of writing. This means no formula’s but natural, informative writing. This can seem like a contradiction: You are told to focus on keywords but then you are told to write naturally. It can be done. Focus mainly on writing naturally but keep the keywords to the forefront of your mind whilst you are doing it.

Natural writing is also varied. So write posts of different lengths and intersperse text posts with photos and video.

Patience
It can take time to build up a following on a blog. Just be patient and keep going.

Microsoft and Yahoo are teaming up. Bing will eventually be taking over all of Yahoo’s search business. Previously search engine optimisation concentrated on Google as Yahoo only had a 9% share of searchers and Microsoft only 6%. The new combination and the likelihood that the new Bing will keep increasing its share means that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has to pay more attention.

A recent document published by Bing for webmasters reiterates the importance of optimising your website for all the search engines. Bing says:

‘If webmasters don’t provide search engines with good, keyword-oriented, well written caption source data, the resulting captions created by algorithm, no matter how hard we try, won’t represent your website as well as those websites whose webmasters did provide this unique and important data.’

1) Keywords. There has been a lot of talk recently that keywords are not as relevant as they once were. Not so for Bing who have reiterated their importance. Choosing and using your main keywords is essential to the correct optimisation of your site but so is making sure that your writing is natural. Keywords should ‘pepper’ your pages not be stuffed in there willy-nilly.

2) Titles. Bing likes unique titles and meta descriptions for each page.

Your page title tags are what search engines use as the link and main title of a page’s listing. Its the first port of call so they need to be good.

Having unique titles enables more of your pages to be ranked for relevance. Your titles need to reflect the content of the pages you are submitting. Important keywords need to be within the page content and in the title tag too.

Meta descriptions should describe what your page is about. Again relevant keywords that reflect your page’s content need to appear in the meta descriptions.

3) Inbound links from sites that have your keywords in the title tag. The purpose of this is so that sites that are linked are as relevant to each other as possible. This provides a relevant user experience. If you are looking for widgets and have found a site that sells them you are more likely to click on a link for other widgets than you are any other link on that site.

Writing well informed and relevant content is a good way to get inbound links. Other sites will want to help their readers by sending them to you. It takes time to build an audience this way but the results are worth it.

4) Ethical link-building campaign. Don’t use spam link tactics or buy links. These are ‘black hat’ search engine optimisation techniques which Bing will not approve of. Black hat techniques are for the desperate or the ill-informed.

5) Submit to Bing. If your site is new or has been altered in anyway it is important to submit it to Bing. This seems obvious but it is surprising how many companies fail to do this. You will still be searched if you do not submit your site but doing so should increase the speed at which you are trawled.

6) Use Bings tools: The Bing Webmaster Center offers lots of information to help with website optimisation.

How a website looks and how easy it is to use are very important for everyone who uses the internet. If a site is unappealing or awkward to use it may even put people off investigating further no matter how good the information on your site.

So, website design is vital. But, and this is a very, very large but ….. None of this matters if you do not have your website optimised for the search engines. You are wasting your time – you won’t get many visitors and you will wonder why.

Design and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) need to go hand in hand. If you are looking to redesign your site to make it more appealing and user friendly you need to work with a designer that works with SEO as well. If you are doing it yourself then you need to learn the basics immediately otherwise most of your hard work/time/money will be going to waste.

The transition from one site to another needs careful consideration.

Don’t Loose Old Traffic
The internet provides bio feedback. Looking at the results that your efforts bring will inform your future decisions. There will be things about your old site that were good and attracted more visitors. Some pages for example may have attracted more traffic than others. Don’t ignore this information, let it guide the development of the new site.

Changing urls
Every page on a website has its own url. When you build a new site unless you have the exact same structure for the new site then you will still be getting traffic trying to access your old site. This traffic is important so you need to make sure it comes through to the new site. This involves redirecting old pages to new ones on the redesigned site. Implementing what is known as a 301 redirect means that your old pages are permanently redirected to a new address.

Check for incoming links to your site from other websites and blogs. These are particularly important pages to redirect as they will be live and people who show an interest will get a blank page unless you do something about it.

Checking the new site
When developers are working on the final stages of a website they need to test it online. Usually your old site will still be running. Having duplicate content on the internet is not looked at favourably by the search engines. The new site will look like it has copied content from the old one. You can be penalised for this. You will not get good traffic and its very difficult to remedy the situation once your site is out there.

Luckily its a situation which is easy to avoid. You just need password protection on the site. This means that search engines cannot just scan the site until its ready for release.

Over the coming weeks Propero digital will be providing SEO tips that will help to explain how sites can improve their ranking.