Let’s say you work for a company whose website isn’t performing too well. You know the site needs the TLC of an SEO expert but you can’t find the words to explain to your boss exactly why the company should hire one.

Getting Her Attention

Most bosses understand their company’s bottom line. With that in mind your opening gambit should be something like this.

“Our website hasn’t been set up correctly and it’s costing us money”

There are two reasons why this is likely to have the desired effect.

1. You stated something is costing the company money - this pushes buttons
2. You stated something that’s been paid for, the website, isn’t right - so does this

Having grabbed her attention you need to give her the information in simple bite sized chunks. There’s no need to go into any technical detail whatsoever, you’ve got her and you can’t risk losing her.

The On Page Stuff

Many people get horribly confused about on page SEO because it involves some HTML mark-up and some weird sounding thing called meta data. The thing is, you don’t need to talk about any of that. On page SEO can be summed up very simply, and here goes.

“Our web pages haven’t been written and presented in a way that search engines like Google can easily understand and this means people are not finding our pages when they search for the products and services we offer.”

That pretty much covers on page SEO. There’s no need to go into any more detail.

Keyword Research

Although you’ve hopefully got the message across with respect to the on page optimisation you may want to reinforce this with a few words about the actual content of the pages. Keyword research is another area of SEO that confuses people with it’s KEI’s and long tails. By the way, have you seen this new seed keywords research tool? Again, a few simple words is all that’s needed. Try this.

“Not only have our pages not been put together properly but the words that have been used are also wrong. It’s possible to find out what people type into search engines and we should make sure our pages use these words.”

Link Building

OK, so you’ve established the website’s content isn’t up to much but we also need to get across the idea that the site needs others to link to it if it’s going to get to work for the business. You also need to talk about link quality, a link isn’t just a link. Try this.

“There aren’t many other websites linking to ours and this is bad news. When another site links to us, especially a good site, the search engines regard the link as a vote of confidence in our site. If we get lots of good votes our site will show up more in the search engines.”

Measuring It All

Finally you need to impress upon your boss that none of the above needs to be guess work and it’s very easy to measure the impact of doing it. This should be an easy sell because this is where you put your money where your mouth is, or your job on the line!

“The good news is this is all fixable and we can measure the effect of fixing it.”

That’s it. A really simple SEO pitch any boss can understand. Let’s re-cap and stitch it all together.

The Full Pitch

“Our website hasn’t been set up correctly and it’s costing us money”

Pause while your boss stops what she’s doing and gives you her attention.

“Our web pages haven’t been written and presented in a way that search engines like Google can easily understand and this means people are not finding our pages when they search for the products and services we offer.”

Very short pause then….

“Not only have our pages not been put together properly but the words that have been used are also wrong. It’s possible to find out what people type into search engines and we should make sure our pages use these words.”

Another short pause….

“Also, there aren’t many other websites linking to ours and this is bad news. When another site links to us, especially a good site, the search engines regard the link as a vote of confidence in our site. If we get lots of good votes our site will show up more in the search engines.”

And now the bit where you put your head on the block….

“The good news is this is all fixable and we can measure the effect of fixing it.”

Fear and Greed

Finally, if you need to deal the killer blow before you rest your case try this.

“Our competitors are doing this stuff, if we don’t we are leaving ourselves exposed.”

TTFN

d

It’s said a picture paints a thousand words, but not in the eyes of a search engine. Search engines like words, they love indexing them, reading them, devouring them.

By all means use great imagery on your site, but don’t get hung up about photographs at the expense of your words.

TTFN

d

Keywords are a crucial aspect of any website. Making sure your web pages are optimised for the words and phrases used by people on Google etc is vital for on-line success. In essence all a search engine is doing is acting as a middle man between people who want something and people who can provide it. Whether it’s a singing teacher, a great deal on a new car or simply some advice on a problem, people use search engines and these match search words with websites - it’s that simple.

There are many ways of finding keywords and some great tools to make the task easier. This list, although in no way exhaustive, offers five ways to start looking for great keywords today.

1. FREE Keyword Tools
   There are many free keyword tools that will give you search volumes for keywords and suggest alternatives. The free versions of these tools won’t provide information on competition and keyword effectiveness but you can pretty much figure this stuff out yourself. One simple tip is to take the keyword suggestions and search for pages with these keywords in their title element, often called the title tag - a fairly good indicator of a page being optimised for the term. Here’s an example of just such a search.
2. Guessing and Brainstorming
   Why not? It’s free and it might work. Although it may seem like a bad idea guessing and brainstorming what people are searching for isn’t that far fetched. If you have analytics tools embedded in your site, and if you haven’t you really should, you can see if your guessed and brainstormed keywords are generating traffic. It’s not the most scientific way of finding great keywords but on a tight budget it’s hard to beat.

   You can further check your guessed and brainstormed list using the many free keyword research tools mentioned above. However, don’t be too quick to dismiss phrases with no search volume. If you think the phrase is viable try it, but make sure you can test for its use by using analytics.

3. Drilling into your Analytics Data
   Leading on from number two, your analytics data is a great source of keyword research. Where the keyword research tools give you data on general search volumes, analytics gives you data on searches that have resulted in a visit to your site. Grab the top 10 keyword searches that have sent traffic to your site. For each keyword establish your search engine position. If you are in position one for a search term you are in good shape. If however, you’re in position six on page three for a term imagine how much traffic it might generate if you can improve on that.
4. Traditional Media
   TV adverts, radio adverts, adverts in magazines, junk mail etc all use trigger words to entice people and grab their attention. In a similar way to guessing and brainstorming you can optimise for keywords you find in traditional media sources.

   Again you can test these phrases for search volume using the free research tools but as with your brainstormed keywords don’t be too quick to dismiss words that show low search volume, especially if you are chasing a particular geographic area.

5. Ask your Friends
   Asking your friends and colleagues may seem like a strange idea but it isn’t. Although the data in the keyword research tools is valuable and very useful the one thing you don’t know is what the person who used the keyword was thinking. You can take an educated guess but you won’t actually know.

   Say you run a hotel and you want to target the weekend break market. You could ask your contacts what they would search for if they were looking to get away for a few days. If you frame a question to your friends such as this you may well discover some great keywords. The SeedKeywords tool is a free resource to help you with this approach to keyword research.

Hopefully this list of free keyword research techniques will help you improve your website’s visibility in the search engines. Keyword research can be very time consuming but the rewards can be huge. There are lots of great keywords with high search volume and very little competition just waiting to be snapped up.

Keyword tools are superb. I use them and love them. Sometimes however just creating a list of seed keywords can be a challenge, especially if you are too close to the subject or company. With the phenomenon of social networking it seemed plausible that my various networks of contacts might be able to help. So I created a tool to do just that.

Enter SeedKeywords.com. This new simple, free tool lets you pose a question such as “You are thinking about buying a new car. What would you search for“. The system creates a unique URL for this question for you to send to your network of contacts. You can use email, forums, Twitter, Facebook etc to provide them with the link and ask them to carry out a search - in exactly the same way they would on a search engine. As your contacts carry out a search, a list is built showing the search terms they used.

With SeedKeywords you can quickly build a diverse seed keyword list and although I’m not suggesting you should optimise for these terms it’s a great way to start your keyword research using the well established tools. That said several people have reported discovering keywords that are generating traffic!

It’s early days but already I’m thinking this tool could be useful for optimising for specific socio economic groups and possibly for local search as local habits might be poles apart from what the data in the large keyword tools is suggesting, or not, who really knows.

TTFN

d