The Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses: Part 3. Guest post by Nichola Stott.

In this third part of a series guide to search engine optimisation, we’re going to look at keyword research. Keyword research is possibly one of the most important (if not the most important) foundation of an optimised website.  You may also wish to read the other posts in this series, which are the introduction to SEO and technical SEO factors.

Keyword Targetting

Search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! use crawlers to retrieve information about all the information on the web. Complex weighted algorithms are then applied to determine which websites are relevant matches to a keyword search. Although these algorithms are sophisticated, and the crawlers are numerous and frequent; they are still not human, so we need to be clear and concise when constructing web pages so that the words people would use when searching for the products and services we offer appear in content, meta data, title and image tags.

To help you with keyword targeting there are a number of tools you can use. The important things to think about are:

Depending how much volume and competition there is on a keyword, you may prefer to choose a less competitive term. If a term is less competitive, then you will stand a better chance of ranking for that term, possibly in a shorter time too.

As an example if I offer a “virtual assistant” service, the term is highly competitive according to Google External Keyword Tool. It may make sense for me to also target “virtual assistant UK”, which is less competitive.

Free Tools for Keyword Research

Google

Spyfu

Wordtracker (offers free trial)

In part four, we’re going to take a look at where and how to apply your keywords in site content, in site meta data and in your HTML tags (such as title and image tags.)

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.

In this second part of The Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses we will be looking at technical SEO considerations, to help you market your online business in the search engines. If you would like to start at the very beginning, you may wish to check out the introduction “What is Search Engine Optimisation?”

Objective: Our objective is to ensure that our technical set-up and foundation is optimal, so that anything we build on top of that can be more easily found and indexed.

To read the complete article click here

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin  or twitter.

Guest post by Nichola Stott, The Media Flow.

The Guide to Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses – Part 1.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practise of ensuring that your site is built, and marketed in such a way; that search engine crawlers can more easily identify and rank your site, for the type of content and business you offer.

Why is this important?

Search is one of the most common online activities, and often the greatest driver of visits to any online business or blog, providing your site is optimised correctly. In fact the global search market place drives more than 100 billion searches a month, and as a region Europe drives the highest percentage of these global searches, according to leading global digital measurement company comScore.

During the course of this five part series, we are going to be looking at the fundamental areas of search engine optimisation, which are technical considerations; site building considerations, and site marketing considerations. In the final fifth edition, we will be looking at myths and common misconceptions, including practises to avoid, as well as credible sources for further reading.

In today’s post we’re going to look at the current state of the search engine market place and the very first steps…

Historically there used to be a number of different search engines, including Alta Vista, Alltheweb, Ask Jeeves, Hotbot etc. As Google began to rise in popularity and search became an extremely profitable business, due to the sponsored listings served with natural listings there was a lot of acquisition and consolidation in the marketplace. Yahoo! bought Alta Vista and Alltheweb, a number of partnerships were struck whereby the most popular search providers now power the search engine on popular online destinations, e.g. Google provides the search on AOL.

Today in the UK, Google has around 91% of the search engine market share, Bing and Yahoo! have around 3.5% each, Ask has 1% and the remainder is made up of a number of smaller search engines combined.

What this means is that to work smartly, any small to medium online business should focus on ranking well in Google first and foremost.  Additionally, tracking your appearance in search engines should be limited to Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

As a first step, you should ensure that you register for Google analytics, to help you monitor and track all traffic to your site, so that you can chart your progress. Secondly, you should also verify your site in Webmaster tools, which will help you to analyse how Google sees your site and also identify any errors.

Both of these Google tools are freely available to help you monitor and improve your traffic and website. We will be looking in more detail at these and other freely available tools, to assist you in optimising your website, throughout this series.

About the author: Nichola Stott is a highly regarded search and social media professional with over a decade of experience in online communications. Nichola is director and co-founder of theMediaFlow, a search and social media agency; and is a regular conference speaker and contributor to online industry media including Econsultancy, SEO Chicks and State of Search. You can contact Nichola on linkedin or twitter.

Make the Internet work for you. An Internet presence is a must, so explore the advantages of ‘search optimisation’ and ‘PPC’ programmes. It is unfortunate but obvious that a lot of money can be spent needlessly bidding on highly competitive words or by bidding on others that receive clicks but fail to convert into sales.

Within Google AdWords there are tools that will allow you to find keywords that you might not have considered that not only receive a decent search rate, but have little competition and will therefore cost less. There are many free and paid keyword research tools available but using Google’s Keyword Research Tool is the best to make decisions based on Google-only data.

• This tool is free
• Google has more search data than many other services
• It shows bid prices and search volume estimates next to keywords
• It shows your current page titles and keywords
• It shows the % of organic and paid traffic going to a URL

For any keyword, the Google Search-based Keyword Tool will show up to 800 related keywords with cost and search volume estimates. The tool also works to show you 100 keywords related to a site that they think you could bid on which are not already in your account. The data is easy to export using a handy export button.

For further reading go to Get Elastic The Ecommerce Blog .