Best SEO Tools
Basic Search Engine Optimisation Tools to Best Optimise Your Site on the Web.
You might be reasonably new to the Web, or have been online for a decade now. Do you understand Search Engine Optimisation, how it works, and how you can optimise your website to start receiving better traffic conversions from search engines? Read on to find out about the best SEO tools: how search engines rank websites and what you can do to improve your rank.
The NZS.com Best SEO Tools article contains the basic SEO tools you need to get your website a better rank in search engines like Google.
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, as it's commonly called, is essential for every website in order to receive traffic via search engines like Google. It is the process of changing the content within your site, the titling of those pages, and the linking which is done from outside of those pages, in order to organically improve the volume of traffic for targeted keywords.
By organically, this means you are not paying to be higher in search ranks, or in prime positions. You are simply doing the best you can with the best SEO tools you have, and setting your Web pages free for search engines to read over or ‘index'. Search engines then decide how useful and popular your pages are. You do not need to submit your site to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo), they are found automatically with the help of inbound linking - whereby hyperlinks from other websites point to your website.
Any SEO company will tell you that there are several easy ways to optimise your site for search engines, but it's an industry that is continually changing with new techniques emerging - and it can be hard to keep up. However, the basics of search engine optimisation revolve around improving four key aspects of your website with the best SEO tools in mind:
HTML Coding
Firstly you need to understand how the HTML coding of your website can affect your search engine optimisation. You may not know that search engines do not actually read over your site as you see it; they read the HTML data behind it. Research shows that search engines crawl the HTML of your website from top to bottom, left to right. This means that you want to target the keywords you want search traffic from most at the top of your coding.
Start with making sure your page/file names, page and meta titles and other tags are cohesive and contain just the keywords you want in them. Many Content Management Systems may automatically label these with dates, strange characters (such as ampersand "&" and percentage "%" characters) and other oddities which are not helpful for search engine optimisation.
If you right click on any page within your website, and click ‘View Page Source', you'll be able to see the HTML coding of your page. You'll notice the page names, titles and tags are some of the first things visible in the code - meaning they are what search engines will read first, and determine to be the most important for ranking.
Navigation
Optimising the navigation menus within your website isn't just important for your visitors, it's also important for search engine optimisation. Most menus are place at the top, right hand corner of your pages, meaning they are one of the first things within the content of those pages that will be read over.
Make sure your navigation menus link with target keywords to the various pages you want highly indexed in search engines, and those linking words are consistent with the page/file name of their destination. In conjunction with the other HTML coding ways to optimise your site with naming and titling, this will ensure search engines understand what your website offers to visitors.
If you'd prefer to have the content of your website read as important by search engines before everything else including menus, you can still keep your menu at the top of the page that visitors see, but you can place the script for it nearer the bottom of the HTML coding. By putting this and any other scripts at the bottom of your page's HTML, you will ensure that the more general and repetitive parts of your pages are not seen as the most important thing about those pages by search engines.
Content
The content within the pages within your website are the next variable in understanding how to best optimise your website for search engines.
True to the order in which search engines crawl your website as mentioned previously, it is obvious that your content will be crawled first paragraph to last paragraph. Therefore, you want the content closest to the top of each page to be the most reflective of the keywords you are targeting.
A core ideal behind search engines is to present all available unique information for you to choose from - rather than offering you repetitive information which is available in several places. Make sure the content within each page is unique, and not available elsewhere on the Web. This will ensure that search engines see it as original, and not copied from somewhere else - an essential SEO technique.
The headings within the pages on your website (coded by H1 and H2 HTML) are seen as the most important content on each page, followed by any bolded text and the first few words in your first paragraph. As search engines crawling your pages put extra weight on these aspects of your content, make sure they contain the exact keyword phrases you are targeting several times.
Repeat targeted keywords throughout the content of each page, but don't overdo it. Search engines recognise ‘keyword stuffing', whereby a page is simply stuffing in repetitive relevant keywords and little actual content - and they will see this as a reason to devalue that page's ranking.
Links
The final tool for understanding the basics of search engine optimisation is learning how to link correctly within your site, and also get others to link back to you.
Links to sections within your site should be centred around keyword phrases. When linking to pages around your site, make the linking keywords something targeted - a phrase that a visitor might type into a search engine - instead of something generic. A good example is using 'interior design services' rather than 'click here'.
In a nutshell, gaining links from other relevant websites shows search engines that your site is popular and respected within your industry.
For example, if you operate an interior design company, getting a popular homewares magazine website to link to your site as a resource will be a great step for your search engine optimisation.
While unrelated sites linking to to you will not hurt your SEO, related sites are seen as much more favourable. Check out the resource Creating a Link for more information on how to improve your SEO with inbound links.
Looking for a professional SEO company to get your website optimised for search engines, that can apply the best SEO tools to your website? Check out the NZS.com directory.
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Technology images from Flickr: First Rate SEO, Microchip and Cable.
