Keywords are the lifeblood of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Although search engines no longer place as much importance on them for rankings as they used to, they are still crucial to setting up your SEO campaign for two reasons.

Firstly, it can help focus your mind when generating content and choosing your website’s domain name to have a full list of words which are important to your business, and sales aims. Second, and most importantly, the person searching for you will be using keywords and they will want to find a site that matches their enquiry.

As well as standard terms connected to your business and industry, you need to widen the keyword net to include all possible angles from which someone may approach your company. These include:

Your people: If any of your staff have a strong reputation in the industry, then they will probably attract attention based on this alone. By connecting that reputation openly to your company through keywords, you can achieve the maximum number of hits via personal contacts and recommendations.

Your place: There have always been services for which people wish to stay local, and the advent of green issues has popularised ‘buying local’ even further. Make the most of this by including geographical keywords in your list.

Your business: What questions would you expect someone to ask about your business? These should all be included in your keyword list, whether who, what, where, why, when and how.

If you are looking to instigate an SEO campaign for your business, contact NSDesign for a free no-obligation quote.

It’s a question we hear a lot  – mainly from clients that we’re building a “first” website for.

Why is my website not in Google yet?  Something must be wrong…

While all us experts may laugh at the naivety of such a question, for many clients the relationship between Google and their site isn’t so obvious.  Many people think Google IS the web..  and that if a site isn’t on Google, it’s not on the web.

In reality – Websites do NOT enter google automatically…  They enter Google because Google Discovers them, and “indexes” them.  Until then, your website can be alive and well, but only discoverable by typing it directly into your web browsers address bar. 

In most cases, Google can take days, weeks, or months to “find” new websites, and so they won’t appear in Google until then.  You can speed this up in 3 ways..

1. Submit the site directly to Google.  See: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/submit_content.html
2. Signup to Google Webmaster Tools, and submit an actual “sitemap” for all the pages on your site.  See: http://www.google.com/webmasters/
3. Get other sites (which are already listed in Google) to link to your site.  Google will then “follow” that link next time it “spiders” the other site.

Doing any (or all) of the above should see your website  listed in the Google results within a few weeks at most…  Getting it listed HIGH UP the results pages depends on how optimised your site is for specific keywords and phrases.  Search Engine Optimisation and understanding search keywords is an effort in itself, but you should be able to easily cover the basics of SEO yourself.  We’re always here to help if you need us!

Following on from the previous article about optimising your website or blog text, the keywords you choose to focus on are vital to the success of your website.

The wording should not only be relevant to your site, but also relevant to what potential customers are searching for. A good idea is to try and think like your customers. For example, if you sell fishing equipment then words such as ‘rods’, ‘lines’ and ‘bait’ as well as brand names of specific products will regularly be searched for.

Unfortunately there is no way round it; you will have to spend time researching the most popular words. One of the best starting points is very simple; enter a word/phrase into Google and see how many results come up. This will give you a good idea of how much competition there is for that certain phrase; if there are millions of results and the first page is dominated by big players, then it could be too competitive.

Top tips for choosing the best keywords:

•    Understand your customers and think about who you are targeting
•    It’s fine to be creative, but you also need to be choosy
•    Try not to use overly competitive keyword phrases
•    You will need both creativity and persistence

Finally, make sure you use your keywords in your meta data as well as in the titles and copy of each page.