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.

Keywords and keyword phrases are just as important as they once were. Keywords help the search engines to work out what your website/blog/twitter feed are all about and they use this information to match you to the search queries that their customers are making.  They should be one of the most important elements of your search engine optimisation.

There are various ways to find the best keywords for you. The most important thing when you are first looking is to test everything.

Objective
What is your current business objective? This is the most important question. And your keyword search is based on the answers to this question.

Overall, what are you trying to do? Inform people, get more contacts, get more visitors, make more sales? You may have several business objectives and this may lead to the development of several lists of keywords, each one targeted at a different objective. Once you are clear you can then start to find your best keywords for the job/s in hand.

Brainstorm
Along with your team, friends and even customers, brainstorm what you think would be best keywords for your business and its objectives.

Competitors
What keywords are your competitors with better search engine rankings using?

Keyword Research tools
Armed with your list of keywords the next thing to do is to test them with well known keyword research tools:

• Google Keyword Tool
• Google Insights & Trends
• Google Trends
• SEMRush.com
• Keyword Discovery
• WordTracker

These tools enable to track trends and assess the viability of your chosen keywords.  The Google tools are free and the others have both free and paid tools that you can access via their sites.

Professional Help
Keyword research is both an art and a science. Going it alone is time consuming but can be done. However because choosing the right keywords is a pivotal part of your online marketing it is important to get it right. Professional help will save you time and costly mistages.

When the vast majority of people search for something online they use 3 – 4 words. However with more and more business and information sites joining the internet it can be harder to find exactly what you want with only a few words.

Most people start their search with one or two words but if they don’t find what they are looking for they increase the number of words that they use until they find more suitable information.

Earlier on in the year Propero reported that online search queries were getting longer and a new survey from Experian Hitwise shows that this trend continues.

Search queries with an average of eight words or more increased by 6% and those that were five to eight words rose by 2%. Despite the fact that 68% of searches contained between one to four words there were 3% less of this length of search.

For online marketing companies longer search strings mean a more complicated and sophisticated approach to search engine optimisation and potentially more initial expense as more keywords are needed to attract more focused consumers. In the longer term the more targeted a keyword campaign is the better the results. The aim is not to get as much traffic as possible but to generate traffic that converts to sales. Ultimately longer searches help search engines to marry up searchers with the sort of information that they are looking for.

It would be interesting to see word length statistics in a breakdown for the main search engines,  Which search engine’s users use the most words for their searches? for example, would be a good question to have answered.  It would tell us a lot about the search engines.  However currently this sort of information is not available.

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.