Ethical SEO - Top tips part 2

In part 1 of our ethical SEO top tips I talked about how you can make the most of free tools to inform you about your users behavior and how it impacts on your site’s success. In this second part of our top tips I am going to look at the content of your pages and keeping up to date with inbound links.

4. Say what you mean
Search engines don’t understand puns and users don’t search for them. Write copy which uses the language people use to talk about your products and check search terms to see what search engines are thinking your pages are about. Don’t be afraid to use direct and obvious language - it’s what your users are looking for, and its what search engines understand. If you don’t know what language your users use to search for similar products to yours you can easily find out through various research methods. User testing, depth interviews and even card sorting can all be used to reveal how your potential customers think about a product.

Find out more:
User testing
Card sorting

5. Use headings carefully
Search engines place importance on headings (H1’s and H2’s particularly) and read them as being more important than general copy on a page. By including keywords in these headings you can improve your ranking. Don’t use too many though or search engines filter them out and don’t pay attention to them. Keywords within copy can be emboldened using bold or strong in the HTML to place extra emphasis on them for search engines - but again, don’t embolden too many or its the equivalent of shouting and the engines will ignore it.

The great thing about carefully implemented headings is that they can really benefit the user experience of your pages. By providing a structure to the page, users can find information more quickly and more successfully. The BBC’s news article pages are a great example of how headings enable users to navigate through information. By improving the user experience of your pages you can increase conversions and keep your users happy. This technique is a form of persuasive design that can work on e-commerce sites as well as information based sites.
Find out more:
Persuasive design
E-commerce usability

6. Take care of inbound links
Monitor other sites linking to your pages and try to keep track of who is linking where. These incoming links are great for search engine optimization as it shows search engines that other sites value the content on yours and its like a seal of approval. Links from high ranking sites that have greater importance than over other less notable sites, but they are all helpful to your ranking and should be protected. Google webmaster tools has a nifty feature that shows how many sites are linking to your pages that can be set for easy access via an iGoogle account so you can keep track easily. If you need to change the URL of a page, its worth asking the sites that link to the current URL to update it to the new one, this way you wont loose your page rank when you change it, and you get to keep a source of traffic to your site too.
Find out more:
Google webmaster tools

I hope you have found our top tips for ethical seo interesting, if you would like to chat about them further then contact us - we’d love to hear from you.