Week 10

This week we discussed the topic of SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimisation. This is process of improving the visibility of a web page or website when searched in a search engine. You can do this by making changes to the content layout and the language of the site.

Things such as HTML helps to highlight key words in your site that is what your site is focused on, or by using written descriptions like HTML meta-tags. This site and other CMS’s give you the option to edit this manually.

Search Engines like Google and Safari use these keywords to index websites or webpages. They use this information as a basis for ranking the websites in terms of which site shows up at the top of the list.

Onsite SEO involves the changing of webpage to improve its position in search engines.

Offsite SEO is other ways to promote your site not involving the changing of the actual site. Ex: Social Media Campaigns or Content& Inbound Marketing)

Organic SEO does not involve paid efforts to generate traffic to a site, although there are some ways to generate traffic that involve buying it that are effective. SEM, is Searching Engine Marketing, that involves the payment of improvement to SERPS results, it puts you site within ad results via AdWords, an Pay-per-click programmes. however, even SEM depends on a certain amount of language to be effective.

Keyword research is a practice used to find and research search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search. You can use keyword research to decide on the correct language to use in your content, or how to edit your content so that your language matches your preferred audience.

To do this you need to build a list of 1 and 2 word terms that relate to your blog contents, website and interests etc. Think of other related themes, synonyms, antonyms and metonyms. Then use the keyword tools such as Google AdWorks Keyword Planner or WordTracker, to measure the search value of your terms.

Make a 3 line Mission Statement for your About Page that uses all your keywords. Make sure to vary you keywords by pages, use each page as a separate landing page. Each page can be optimised with one key phrase using 3 keywords to sum up that page. Include the keywords throughout the page description and page content.

Though language is important, and suiting your audiences, this language changes regularly. This can be a threat and an opportunity. There are tools that you can use to identify trending language with your audience, include these terms in your future keyword research.