13-steps to SEO

I knew we'd missed something! There is no point in getting visitors to your site if your site doesn't sell, be it subscriptions, one-offs or merchandise. At the heart of this will be your copywriting.

You do this on all your marketing, right? Well you should do it on your website too. The two key variables you need to measure are how much you spend and how much you get back over the lifetime of the product sold.

However innocuous a proposed change to your site may seem, don't do it without consulting your SEO expert first. Even the smallest thing might change the way your site is assessed.

Also, search engines are constantly changing the way they rank sites. Don't chase these changes unless you are an expert as the chances are you'll do as much damage as good and that even an expert would get a better return from building new pages.

It takes time. If you've done everything right, you might need to wait three months for your site to be visited and indexed by Google & co and then the same again for the sites that link to you to be indexed.

With good website 'visitor statistics analysis' software (not the package you got for free) you can find out where your paying visitors come from, what search terms they use and how they travel through your site. With such information you can target your SEO to where the money is.

The best (and free) way to get listed on Google, Yahoo and msn is via links into your site from other sites that are already listed. This includes important directories such as DMOZ (aka The Open Directory), Yahoo and business.com.

The free route into the major search engines' databases is via links into your site from other sites that are already listed there.

If you are in a rush and think you can afford it you can 'pay to submit' to some of the major search engines (but not Google). Make sure it's worth your while as it may cost $29/year per page. And this doesn't mean your site will perform well and get visitors, it's just to get in the race. Should you get them, those visitors can cost you up to 30 cents per visit (or 'click'). Crikey!

Trying to cheat the search engines (spamming) can get your site penalised or even banned. A simple rule for staying the right side of a ban is to not do anything that you might not do if you weren't trying to impress the search engines.

Use each page to target a 'collection' of keyphrases. For example, don't just target 'jaguar e type' but also related keyphrases such as 'jaguar e type sales', 'e type restoration' and 'etype spare parts'.

Content is King.

You want as much relevant (to your target market) content on as many pages as possible. Think hundreds of pages, thousands if possible. Chances are you've got a back catalogue of content somewhere. If so, get it up. If not, plan a programme of page generation.

Sorry, a little bit more technical stuff is needed so I'll be brief:

• Put scripting (eg javascipt and CSS) in separate files where possible
• Search engines analyse a page's code from the top to the bottom and that at the top is considered more important.
• You can take advantage of this by dividing your page into <div>s, placing the most keyphrase-rich <div>s at the start of the page's code and using CSS to control where the <divs> appear in browsers.

On to Step 5: Site Content

Attention to your site structure is essential. Get it wrong and your site will at worst never get on the search engines and at best be handicapped there. Do it right and you give all your pages a big boost. Apologies in advance for getting a little bit technical here. If you don't follow all the terms, ask your webmaster.

Your website name, folder names and page names can all improve your site's SEO and increase visitor numbers if they include your keyphrases. For example, if you have a classic car magazine:

• The website (or domain name) could be www.theclassiccarmagazine.com. www.classiccar.com or www.classiccarmagazine.com would be better but someone already owns them. If you are just targeting a UK audience, www.classiccar.org.uk is ok and available. (If you are such a publisher, go buy that domain name now! - the research is on me.)
• You may have a folder called 'jaguar' as in the URL http://www.theclassiccarmagazine.com/jaguar/etype.html.
• And the above URL also shows us a possible page name, 'etype'.

Also, avoid capitals and spaces. Use hyphens and not underscores and then no more than two unless you must.

Search engine users search with words and phrases, e.g., someone interested in old cars may search with the phrase "classic cars".