How to prepare your web presense for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
All partners of an organisation’s online activity are required to understand a minimum of SEO and SEM. Concerned are: strategysts, business analysts, copywriters, video producers, graphic artists, web developers, IT managers, marketing professionals, subject matter experts.
Today, I reveal a judiciously selected set of SEO and SEM techniques.
This article is part of a series which addresses key issues and opportunities of web content production. To excel with SEO and SEM, it is essential to grasp the importance of Customer Personas. To understand what follows, and if not already done, please check out: Do you know whom you’re talking to? | The Customer Persona.
The Business Scenario
A financial advisory company provides solutions for French business professionals who live and work in Switzerland.
Gloria, the owner, wants to write an online article that’ll be found by Customer Persona John Executive. More specifically, the article will address two previously identified elements: the goal of “wanting to be legal” and the pain of “feeling vulnerable about the current expat status”.
The idea being that potential customers who have the above goal and pain will search the Internet for help.
It is assumed that such potential customers will enter certain keywords and search phrases that relate to the two elements previously identified.
The Solution
The financial advisory company uses WordPress to write a blog post. Remember, posts are “dynamic” web pages that are date driven. They appear in descending date order on a web page.
To optimize for SEO, they must consider 7 elements. Navigate down to SEO Guidelines for concrete examples about the first three.
1. The NAME of the blog post.
2. The TITLE of the blog post.
3. The DESCRIPTION of the blog post, as displayed in Google search results.
4. The length of the article (blog post).
5. The keywords, relevance and occurrence.
6. The name attributed to outbound links.
7. The number of inbound links from other web sites.
If you’ve time, click here to learn more about SEO optimised words, links and image files.
Now it’s your turn
Before lesson 3 arrives, I’d like you to do 2 things:
1. Watch the 3.5 minute video (navigate to the bottom of this page).
2. Prepare an SEO optimised online article for your own customer persona. Do so by following the step-by-step SEO Guidelines (down here).
Need mentoring?
Homework and video tutorial
Before lesson 3 arrives, I’d like you to do 2 things:
1. Watch the 3.5 minute video (navigate to the bottom of this page).
2. Prepare an SEO optimised online article for your own customer persona. Do so by following the step-by-step SEO Guidelines (down here).
.
SEO Guidelines
1. Write your blog post NAME in an SEO optimised way.
Given John Executive’s Objective and Pain (see above) he might launch a search by typing into Google “financial advice for french national working in switzerland”
Example: to increase the chance of being found, we name our blog post (website name)/financial-advice-french-national-switzerland
2. Write your blog post TITLE in an SEO optimised way.
Most template based WordPress blogs give you two choices:
1. a title that is visible to your readers
2. a title that is destined for SEO, visible on your browser tab. Watch the video to discover how to take advantage of this feature.
Example: For attractive reading and with John Executive in mind, we name our article “How to be safe and legal. Financial advice for French nationals working in Switzerland”.
Example: For SEO optimization we name the article “Financial advice for French nationals working in Switzerland”. NB: search engines allow a maximum of 70 characters for the title. Place the most relevant key word(s) at the beginning of the sentence.
3. Write your blog post DESCRIPTION in an SEO optimised way.
Descriptions are displayed in Google search results. An succinct, relevant and SEO savvy description is good for search engine optimisation AND seduces searchers to make the important step of clicking through to visit your site.
Example: “We provide sound financial advice to French professionals working in Switzerland. Our highly specialised group of advisors are based in Geneva, Switzerland.” NB: Search engines allow a maximum of 150 characters for the description.
As usual, please let me know what you think by leaving a comment in the Comments section here below ↓. Talk soon. Doris
Photocredits:
Header image kindly provided by Derrick Tyson, Flickr
under Creative Commons license.
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