Introduction
One of the best and most obvious ways to gain new web design clients is by ranking better in the search engines. If you can’t afford to hire a professional search engine optimization (SEO) company then read this article all the way through because I’m about to teach you a few strategies that we’ve personally used to get Interspire.com ranked on the front page of Google for a lot of competitive search terms.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization (or SEO as it’s affectionately called) is the ongoing process of tweaking and modifying your website in an effort to rank competitively in the search engines for one of more keywords that people will use to search for your business.
As a web designer I’m sure you’d agree that if more people were able to find your site in the search engines then you could dramatically increase the number of clients you have, right? Well it’s the same for most businesses, and a good SEO plan is where you should start.
The ‘One Hour a Day, 30 Day’ SEO Plan
Search engine optimization is part science, part art and part luck. The good news is that we can use a proven scientific approach to help your website rank better in the search engines, but you first have to decide which keyword(s) you want your site to rank for.
If you can dedicate just one hour a day (for 30 days) to the search engine optimization plan I’m about to show you then there’s a great chance that you’ll be able to significantly improve how your web site ranks in the search engines for the keywords people are using to find you.
#1: Getting Links Back to Your Website
This is hands down the most important search engine optimization strategy you can spend your time on. When another website links back to yours, Google sees this as a positive vote for your website, and as such will take this into account when determining which sites should be at the top of the pile.
The more sites you have that link back to you, the higher your site will appear in the search results, however there is one main factor to consider with this strategy, and that’s the credibility of the sites linking back to yours.
#2: On-Page Search Engine Optimization
On-page keyword optimization involves making changes to existing pages on your website so they include the keywords you want to rank in the search engines for. On-page optimization includes a number of different ‘sub strategies’, which are:
- Keyword density: How often do the keywords you want to rank for appear on your page? This is measured as a percentage, such as 5.8%. So let’s say you want to rank on Google for ‘red sports cars’. On most pages of your site you’ll want to include the text ‘red sports cars’ and also variations of this phrase, such as ‘red cars that are sporty’, ‘sports cars that are red’, ‘sports cars’, etc.
- Header tags: You absolutely MUST include the keywords you want to rank for in a
…
tag on your site. H1 tags tell the search engines that the text between them is important, and you should aim for just one
tag on each page as close to the top as you can. In our example you might use
Red Sports Cars
on one page and
Luxury Red Sports Cars
on another page. - Page title: This is the most important on-page thing you can optimize. Your page title is the text that’s used to form the link back to your site from the search engines, so it needs to include the keywords you want to rank for, and usually in variations, such as
- Internal linking structure: You want to use the keywords you want to rank for to link between pages on your site. For example, on your home page you might link to a category page using the text ‘sports cars’ and on that category page you would link back to your home page with the text ‘red sports car’. This is an internal two-way link, and although internal links don’t hold nearly as much weight as external ones, you should link to different pages on your site using a few different combinations of your keywords.
- Keywords at the very top of the page: You should always include your main keywords as close to the top of the page as you can, because Google will look at the text on your site from top-to-bottom and will treat the text closer to the top of the page with a higher importance.