Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is a way of enabling your website to be easily found online via relavant searches by quality customers. What do I mean by this?

Whether you are an international franchise or a local photographer, your customers are likely to be looking for different things (using different keywords) to fill a specific need (relavancy). A quality customer is the one looking for a photographer in Cape Town and finding the local photographer and the budding entrepreneur up country finding your franchising opportunity.

This analogy shows how important relavancy in SEO is for your website and for your business.

So, here are my 5 Essential SEO Tips:

Keyword Research:

Keyword research is vital when considering the content on your website. Keywords are used in your domain name, page and post URLs, your page titles, keywords, descriptions and of course your on-page content. A search term with a high popularity and low competitiveness is ideal. Check out Google Keyword Tool for your keyword's popularity & competitiveness.

Content: 

Next of course is good quality, keyword rich content. Don't forget that you are writing to your audience and not to your favourite search engine. Make your pages or blog posts interesting and relevant to your website. Update the content on your website frequently as recency plays a factor when optimising for SEO, too.

Site Map:

Your website needs a sitemap, which should be linked to every page on the site. This will help the search engines as well as guests to your website find every page within two clicks. See here for my sitemap, which you will find in the footer of my site.

Incoming Links:

Each website is assigned a certain authority by Google. Websites with great authority linking to your site is a very valuable incoming link. Your aim is to have as many incoming links as possible and the more authority the incoming link has, the better. And – again – the incoming link should be relevant to your website.

Examples of ways to get good incoming links are from online press releases, partner sites, writing guest blogs posts, commenting or engaging in discussion on relevant websites and social networking sites etc. To maximise the effect of your SEO, they should be high quality and come through to as many different pages on your website as possible, not just the home page.

Very NB: Stay away from spammy link exchange sites – your website will be penalised for this.

Reporting:

Implementing monthly reporting systems for your website will allow you to monitor the progress of your optimisation and make changes where necessary. It will also give you clues as to how the market is changing. For example, seasonal changes affect search terms used, which in turn affect which products you will sell better (and therefore promote) during, say, winter vs summer. If you keep checking your reports you will notice immediately when a product is losing momentum or a new one is gaining interest.

The great news, of course, is that ZA SiTES implements and assists with these 5 Essential SEO Tips with every client!