Whether It Is SEO Edinburgh You Wish To Rank For Or Any Other Term, You Need Keyword Research!

So once we have decided what keyword we would like to rank our website for, it is time to assess the other websites that are currently occupying the top of the 1st page for that specific term.  There are many things we need to look at individually but to simplify things; each individual element can be boiled down to one of two categories:

• On Page SEO
• Off Page SEO

If you analyse the competitions on page SEO and off page SEO you will have a much better idea whether or not the keyword you are targeting is possible.  There are many occasions when the keywords you desire are unfortunately next to impossible to rank for, if that is the case then you need to move on and keep looking for keywords that have less competition.

If you do find that your main keyword is going to be harder than expected, don’t worry.  You will find that no matter what industry you are in, there are keywords that are there for the taking.  In fact, you would be surprised at the sheer number of keywords that sites rank for yet have never been optimised for that term, these kinds of keywords can be looked at as less competitive therefore you can certainly target them for yourself through a white hat search engine optimisation service such as what we at Edinburgh SEO Services offer to our clients.

So what sort of things do we look at for on page SEO?  Well for our SEO Edinburgh keyword there are a few things we looked at but they are mainly the following:

• Meta Data
• Keyword Usage
• PageRank
• Internal Link Structure

Once the above areas have been researched and covered, it is then time to look at what off page SEO our competing websites have implemented so that they are at the top of the search engine results pages (SERP’s).  Again, there are many individual aspects we dig into when doing keyword research but they main areas that cover the key individual parts are as follows:

• External Incoming Link Popularity
• Relevance of External Incoming Links
• Anchor Text Used In External Incoming Links

After we have done the above work we are in a much better position to determine whether or not we have a chance with whatever keyword it is we, or our clients, are aiming to rank for.  Of course for us, in this case and the case of this guide, we are looking to rank for the keyword SEO Edinburgh, however no matter what keyword we are targeting, the work relating to the keyword research will always be the same.

It is by employing this research phase we can identify easy keywords to rank for as well as avoiding any potential impossible keywords.  After all, if you are a brand new software development company, wouldn’t it be nice to rank for the keyword “software development”?  The fact is however that this term will likely be very competitive to the point where it is next to impossible to rank for.  If that is the case then think smaller and go for some other related keywords that WILL be possible to rank number one for and will still bring in many targeted visitors to your site.

At the end of the day, we have found that doing extensive and thorough keyword research will again and again save our clients time, money and a lot of heartache in the long run.  We pride ourselves in being honest and up front with our clients, that is why if we feel that you are not able to rank for a certain keyword, we will tell you.

That is of course unlike many other SEO companies out there who will promise you high rankings first and ask questions later.

The 2nd Part Of The SEO Edinburgh Guide Is Over, Looking Forward To Part 3!

We hope you have enjoyed our second part of this guide and are already working on part three.  As we did in our last part, we will give you the position this site currently ranks for the keyword SEO Edinburgh, we are at position 16 in Google.co.uk which is a positive jump of 153 positions.

First things first, what are keywords?  They are basically the search strings people use to find websites when they are on a search engine.  For example, you may have used the keyword “Edinburgh SEO Services” to find this website.  Simply put, your SEO Campaign Doesn’t Stand A Chance If You Don’t Identify Your Keywords.

How did your visitors find your website?

This is the first step to better SEO with selecting and identifying keywords for you site.  Make sure you research what sort of things the person off the street would type to find your product or service.  Try to stay away from industry related terms, instead focus on every day words and phrases.  You will find that these get searched for a lot more often.

Create A List Of Potential Keywords

Once you have brainstormed a few ideas, create a list that you would like your site to rank for.  Once you have that you can then move on to the next process of judging the traffic value and competition of each term.

Choose The Right Keywords For Your Successful SEO campaign

When you have a list of the preferred keywords you would like to have your site ranking for.  Visit the Google keyword tool.  This will give you more information on the numbers you can expect if you were ranking high for particular terms.

Try to focus on terms that will bring you high traffic yet have low competition in the SERP’s.  Once you start to rank for lower competition terms you can then try to tackle the more competitive keywords.  It is advised that you only do this once you have gained authority for your website.

Implement keyword research to improve the quality of search traffic visiting your site.

If you require a certain SEO company in Edinburgh to do the keyword research for you, visit our services page.  There you will find many different methods to improve the visibility of your website.

If you hire an SEO company in Edinburgh chances are you wont encounter these problems as they should all be competent at their jobs.  However, many business owners in Edinburgh feel that they can optimise their own site, sometimes they can, sadly in most cases they cant and run the risk of banning their site completely from the search engines.

SEO can be risky business if handled by someone with little knowledge on the subject.

For those that are trying to optimise their site, you should ask yourself why you are doing it.  The answer of course should be to increase the amount of targeted visitors that have a potential to convert into a sale for the company.  If its not that, then the whole point of starting up a business website is gone.

We should all know that being on the search engines and ranking well organically for terms that are relevant to your site is pretty much like free advertising.  It has been said many times before that SEO can be considered the missing link between a business and a successful business.  SEO will allow you to find more customers as well as being a potential branding tool.

Not many people can find negative ways to describe the impact SEO has had for companies in Edinburgh, however there are negative ways we could describe the methods used by people to get their site ranked.  Unfortunately, many business owners who decide to implement their own SEO campaign can fall into this trap.  Its not intentional, its simply because they didn’t know what the impact would be for what they were doing.

If you are implementing your own SEO campaign then hopefully the following may save you some heartache down the road.

Make sure you get the basics of SEO right to avoid any heartache.

The Use Of Keywords In Search Engine Optimisation

The search engines these days are becoming more advanced in the way they read and understand text on web pages.  However, they are still just a robot and can be fooled by humans.  Some people will insist on adding keywords to their site in the hopes that the search engines will love it, however they are forgetting about the visitor experience.

If a visitor comes to your site and sees badly written content they will simply leave and return never again!  We at Edinburgh SEO Services aim to have your sites written for humans first and foremost and the search engines second.

Remember To Use Meta Tags For Better Search Engine Optimisation

For those that are unfamiliar with meta tags, they are simply pieces of code in HTML format that are used by either a web designer or the software that was used to create your site.  Optimising these tags will be a great way of improving your on page SEO.

Many web designers don’t have a good knowledge on SEO and tend to apply the meta data without thinking about ranking the site.  Fortunately this information is easy to change and change them you should as it can have a significant impact on your rankings.

Those are just a couple of the ways in which you should take care when optimising your site.  If at all you don’t feel comfortable doing this sort of thing then please get in touch, also visit our SEO services page as it aims to give you higher rankings with a touch of a button.

Without a thought out strategy on your keyword research you could inadvertently be optimising your site for terms that a)  Never get searched.  Or b)  Are not relevant to your website.  Both would equate to useless traffic and a website that struggles to convert its visitors into buyers.

The demand of keywords by the user is however only one piece of the puzzle, there are indeed a few other things at play that contribute to creating an efficient keyword research campaign.

Some More Keyword Research Advice & Tips

Brainstorming your potential keywords can benifit any SEO campaign

Firstly lets cover what is known as the supply & demand ratio.  Lets go with the example that has served us well in the last few posts.  Last month there were approximately 40,500 individual searches for the keyword “search engine optimisation”.  This is a huge amount of potential traffic you can get to your site if you were to optimise your site for this keyword.

However there are approximately 37.3 million competing websites for that term.  Now if we were to look at the search traffic for the term “search engine optimisation Scotland” we see that there were approximately 1,300 searches for this keyword last month and only 1.3 million competing websites for that term.

Now out of the keywords “search engine optimisation” or “search engine optimisation Scotland” which one do you think would be the easiest to rank highly for?  The latter of course and only by implementing the correct keyword research will you be able to confidently find this out.

We couldnt resist ...

Remember there are only 10 positions organically on the front page of Google etc and the more competing websites there are the harder it will be for you to make a dent at the top positions.  This is a truth that many SEO companies in Edinburgh “forget” to tell their clients.

Next lets talk about the choice of keyword.  It is great ranking number one for a keyword but you must think of the type of visitor you will be attracting.  Say you had a website that sells laptops, out of the following two search terms, which visitor do you think will most likely buy something online.

1. Laptop Advice
2. Cheap Laptops

The easy answer is “cheap laptops” as it is obviously a buying keyword, yet you would be surprised at the hundreds of companies in Edinburgh that don’t optimise their site for buying search terms such as this, opportunity wasted.

If you follow those basics of keyword research then you should be on the correct path in knowing what terms to optimise your site for.  Keyword research can be very tricky however so if you are new to this it is advised you hire an SEO company to create a keyword list for you and to get you heading in the right direction.  Edinburgh SEO Services can help you with this as well as many other methods to successfully optimise your website, get in touch if you want to find out how.

So Mr CEO, why dont you bother with on page seo for your website?

Dont be in the dark like this bemused chap, on on page SEO is essential for your website!

We at Edinburgh SEO services believe that website design is defiantly an important factor in the success of your business online, however we do believe its not the most important factor.  Can you guess what we think is?

Organic Search Engine Optimisation Is The Most Important Factor In Your Online Success

It is search engine optimisation that will get people to visit your site, they will find you on the search engine when they are looking for the product or service you offer.  They find your site they buy your product, they don’t find your site they don’t buy your product.

We all know the process, search for something on any major search engine and be displayed results in their thousands.  The fact is the vast majority of people that execute this process will only ever click the top 3 pages on the 1^st page.  If they can’t find what they are looking for from them, they will usually just enter another search.

The sites that are below the top 3 will more times than most go unnoticed by the search engine user.  So what should you do if you find that your website is one of the many that are sitting at the lower positions of the SERP’s?  That’s right, you can hire a search engine optimisation agency to improve your organic rankings.

There are many different ways to optimise your website for search engines and one of those ways is to change a few things on each of the actual pages of your site.  If you take the time to optimise each of the pages on your domain, you will see that your entire site will get stronger and will start ranking for more and more terms.

If you make sure you are in control of the following 3 on page SEO factors of your site you should be able to see a benefit with your online rankings.

For Better SEO Make Sure You Have a Healthy Internal Link Structure

Make sure you have a healthy internal link structure for your website.

The search engines love websites that they can crawl easily, the way they do this is by following the links on each page.  Make sure you have a good internal linking structure and point links from certain pages to others.

When creating the links make sure you use text as the link and not the URL, this is called anchor text and it is helping the search engines understand what your page is about.  There are many examples of anchor text on this site, feel free to hunt them out and implement a similar structure on your site.  You will only see a benefit in doing so.

Don’t have too many external links

Besides external links being a gateway for visitors of your site to leave to another domain, external linking could have a negative impact on your PageRank (If you are not sure what PR is, read our article on how to improve your PageRank) if you link out to websites with low authority.  It is however advised that you do contain some external links on your site as this appears more natural, just make sure that they are in locations on your site that will not allow you from losing a targeted buyer.

Make sure you optimise your site for targeted keywords

Make sure that all the pages on your domain mention the terms in which you expect a visitor to search for.  Take this site for example, this is targeted for people with a need to hire an SEO company in Edinburgh therefore the site will be optimised around terms like these.  For more information on this, there are many resources online that give advice on keyword research.

Again make sure it is done naturally and make sure it is all good content you are putting on your site.  If you don’t you will be penalised.

If you require more information regarding on page SEO and how it can benefit your business then please get in contact with Edinburgh SEO services, we are always more than happy to help out.

It is rather obvious that the online market is growing at an insane pace.  A majority of companies are noticing a difference in how they are attracting customers, in the past a business may have got most of its customers through word of mouth, Yellow Pages or TV advertising.  Now, these same companies are investing heavy in to attracting online visitors through search engines such as Microsoft Bing, Google and Yahoo!

If you go online now, you will find everything from stuffed koala bears to HDTV’s.  Companies these days are focusing their attention in a big way to making cash from transactions on their website.  A lot of people are buying and selling online these days and for you to be one of the successful companies that are selling, you will need to attract more people to your website and currently the best way to do this is through search engine optimisation.

EnLIGHTen yourself with good keyword research for your SEO campaign!

Organic Search Engine Optimisation Sounds easy doesn’t it?

Unfortunately it is not.  To have a successful website you are going to really have to plan, research and think about your strategy to improve your rankings.  It can be the nicest looking site in the world but if it’s not getting any targeted visitors from search engines then it is pretty much useless.

With so many Edinburgh based companies optimising their sites it is becoming harder to get noticed.  In a medium that is rapidly growing like the net, your company will have to really think hard about their online plan, which is why so many are hiring SEO companies in Edinburgh.

Now lets take our tried and trusted example once more, say a user goes to one of the big search engines and types in “Edinburgh SEO”.  The users response after the SERP’s have been displayed are rather predictable, they will click on the websites that appear top of the organic search listings.  The websites that appear on the lower have of the first page or even worse, the second page, hardly every get any traffic from the keyword that the surfer used.

Now as far as you are concerned, being a website owner you will naturally want your website to appear higher in the ranking for search terms (keywords) that relate to your site.  That way you will stand a higher chance of getting a visitor that wishes to make a purchase from you.

This is what organic search engine optimisation is all about.  It aims to help you to command higher positions on the results pages of each of the main search engines.  One of the main ways Google and the rest find their results is through the keywords in the content of each site.

Keyword Research Is Critical For Your Online Success

Choosing the right keywords for your website is critical in its success and they will act as an entry way to your site due to the fact that if you understand the specific terms people are searching for, then optimise your site around those terms (keywords) you will have a higher chance of getting that visitor.

This is why if you are hiring an SEO in Edinburgh (or anywhere else for that matter) that it is crucial you sit down with them and have a chat regarding what keywords you wish to rank for.  It is advised you do this for two reasons, firstly it will make sure you and your SEO agency are singing from the same hymn sheet and lastly with the agencies keyword research expertise, they will give you their own recommendations on what keywords are achievable to rank your website for.  There is no point trying to rank a new website for an ultra competitive keyword term such as “credit cards” the competition is simply too fierce.

Have a discussion with the SEO company and make sure you decide on a set list of keywords that you both agree your target audience will type into the search engines to find a service or product such as your.  Then you should optimise your site by including these keywords into the body of the content on your website.

Make sure you are fully aware what is your site is offering.  If your website is offering a service such as pay per click advertising, then incorporate terms such as “PPC”, “AdWords”, “search engine marketing” and “online advertising as well as many more.  Once both parties are agreed on the keyword selection, you are one giant step closer in the right direction to optimising your website for organic search traffic.

On a final note, the keywords that you enter into the content of your website should appear natural and should not simply be a list of terms you want the site to rank for.  The search engines are getting better at identifying websites with keyword lists such as this and when they do find them, they will de-index them from their listings, your website will be gone forever!

The SEO duck applauds at this insight into keyword research!

Keywords are of course only a part of the puzzle and there are many more factors at play that are determining the rank of websites.  These will be discussed in a later post but for now it is important for you to understand the benefit of good keyword research.  If you are still unsure and feel you need more information then please get in touch and contact Edinburgh SEO services, we are always happy to help out with any SEO problem or issue you may be having.

Now just think for one moment the amount of times you have gone through that process of using a search engine in this way and the countless amount of results that Google etc has displayed for you.  You will understand that each and every time you did this, you will usually find the answer to your individual query and at most, you may have needed to click through to the 2nd page of the results.  The rest of the results pages you wont even know exist.

Unfortunatly, the fact is that unless your website is ranking in the high positions for search terms (also known as keywords) then your site will indeed be one of the many hundreds of thousands being ignored by people using search engines today.  By now you may rightly be wondering what it takes to get your site to a higher position in the SERP’s and to become visible to potential customers or clients.

The answer is straightforward enough; through search engine optimisation.

What Is SEO Or Search Engine Optimisation?

SEO is the name given to the process & strategy used to achieve higher ranking results in the organic listings used by search engines.  This breeds a simple equation, the higher you are in the SERP’s the more customers/clients/visitors you will get to your site.  It really is that straightforward!

She knows what SEO is, do you??

Why You Need SEO Services In Edinburgh?

Before we go into that, lets say that websites these days can be (very) broadly matched into four different categories.  These are:

1. Corporate Sites
2. Personal Sites
3. Informational Sites
4. E-Commerce Sites

Now, we can safely say that the first to types of websites mentioned in that list will not usually require any kind of SEO.  This is down to the fact that the target user for those sites will already be using that site.  A personal site is usually for friends & family and a corporate site is usually for the staff already employed at the organisation.

The last two sites in the list however will usually have a need for optimisation for the search engines such as Google, Yahoo & Bing.  If you are a commercial or informational type of site then your web presence will grow by gaining more and more unique visitors.  These visitors will only be able to find your site by having a good ranking in the search engine results and to achieve those rankings you need SEO.

A good start to get these visitors to your site is to take control of the content on your website.  Make sure you have content related to the service or products you offer or provide.  Although Google et all can not read, they do however scan the text on a web page and this means the more relevant your text/content is, the better the chance you will have of ranking high in the search engines.

When you are researching what content to put on your site, make sure you understand the correct keywords to use.  As was stated earlier, keywords are words or phrases on your webpage that describe the main subject of your website, they are also what the search engines will scan and match with the keywords being used by people searching, if the search term keyword matches with a keyword found on your site, the chances of you ranking high will be greater.

We dare you to be happier than this fellow!

Local Internet Marketing In Edinburgh Can Be Achieved With A Little Keyword Research

In the purpose of selecting specific keywords for your website, it is advised that you use terms that you think people will be searching for.  For example, say you are the owner of an Internet Marketing & SEO firm based in Edinburgh and your company is named “Beat Mighty Google & Sons” (I have no idea if that’s a real company or not).  It would be best to optimise your site with keywords for search terms such as:

• Edinburgh SEO
• search engine optimisation in Edinburgh
• SEO in Edinburgh
• SEO Edinburgh
• internet marketing in Edinburgh

This is opposed to optimising your site for the term “Beat Mighty Google & Sons”, because no one will be searching for that term, the vast majority of people/searchers are inputting specific services into the search engines and not brand or company names.

To summarise, make sure you select the right keywords that are more than likely be used by people using search engines to find a service you can provide.  Just make sure you do not overdo it as your site may look too “spammy” and can be removed permanently from the index of websites.

If you are still not convinced that about Edinburgh search engine optimisation services can benefit your business, did you know that

1. More than 85% of people that are connected to the net, use a search engine to find services & products
2. 90% of that 85% don’t even click below the 5 website listed on the first page of the SERP’s
3. 75% of that 90% intend to purchase a product or service

Remember, keywords are only one part of the puzzle.  There are a lot more factors at play as to why certain websites rank higher than others.  If you are based in and around the Edinburgh area and want to know more about the reasons why SEO can benefit your business, then please get in contact with Edinburgh SEO Services for affordable search engine optimisation.