So I have been giving out SEO advice a lot this month, and thought I would write a little guide for some basic SEO tips and tricks.

At the incubator we only fire with ‘real bullets’.  John Paul and I have launched our own creative project and I have just done all the SEO work for it.  The examples below are from our project True Secrets:  Augmented reality delivered via smart phone. Professional actors recreate 7 secrets of Melbourne’s notorious past at secret locations: Be a ghost in their world.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation is what it stands for – basically it is making sure that when someone searches for you via Google or similar, you are what they find instead of something or someone else.

Basically everyone; if they remember your name, will Google you to find you, so make sure you can be found.  Almost all other forms of advertising are useless if your potential audience can’t simply Google you to find your website/ show/ art.

SEO Basics

SEO is all about Keywords, and using them effectively is fairly easy once you have a basic understanding of what you are doing.

First a few basic terms I will use:

Primary Keyword (PKW): This is a word that clearly identifies the page, you want to have only one or maybe two of these and utilise them in several ways discussed below

Secondary Keywords (SKW): These are the other relevant words for the page, which people might use to find your website.  They might also be PKWs for other pages.

URL: This stands for Uniform Resource Locator (wiki) basically it is the web address in the address bar of your browser for each individual web pages and item on each of your pages.

Page Title: This is the name that appears in your browser application bar

Meta Description: This is what Google sees and shows to a user when they search for your site.  If you don’t have this, Google just grabs some text that it “thinks” is relevant to put on your site.  This is very powerful for SEO.

Meta Keywords: This is the first place Google looks for relevance, and you absolutely need relevant words in here, which people will look for in order to find your site.  This is created automatically by your CMS, but should be editable and updatable by you as you change your optimise each page further and further targeting your audience.

H1: Stands for Heading 1, or the highest/largest type of heading.  It can be styled any way that you wish using CSS, but it must be on your page, and must include at least one of your PKs.

H2: Stands for Heading 2, or a Secondary Heading.  It can also be styled any way that you wish using CSS.  You ideally want to mention your SKWs or second PKW in this heading.

Putting it Into Practice

Ok, so now you know a few basic terms and what SEO means.  It is time to start using them to create an SEO strategy.

Step 1.

Download this template Document which I developed to help people create an SEO strategy for each web page you want to target.

Step 2.

Visit adwords.google.com and login (if you don’t have a Google Account, get one) go to

Reporting and Tools> Keyword Tool

Step 3.

Take a look at the screen shot below.  Now you want to:

1. Enter some words you think are relevant to your site in the box.

2. Optional: You can put a similar site in this box to get some ideas

3. Expand the Advanced Options and Filters

4. Make sure your location is set to Australia

5. Click Search

6. See how much each of the keywords you chose are searched for in a month

7. See some keyword ideas that are relevant to your chosen keywords or Website

Step 4.

Look for about 15 relevant keywords to your show/ site and rank them according to “Local Monthly Searches” from highest to lowest (you can just click on this column to sort it)

Step 5.

Now you need to select one or two of these words as the PKWs of each of your main pages.  On your website,  you probably only want to target 2-3 pages for a show.

For example: the page with the Show details and maybe the cast / credits page.

Fill in the template for each page you are targeting.  Following the guidelines on the template.

Note the Proliferation of PWKs in the URL, the Page Title, the Meta Description, H1 and Content.  We chose highly searched words to ensure we are easily found for this particular site.
Step 6.

Now you are ready to build or optimise your actual website.

Building or Optimising your Website

As we recommend WordPress as your CMS, I will be talking about how to do these steps in WordPress only.  Each CMS/ Website is different, but the general steps are the same.  To start with Login to your WordPress back-end and navigate to the Plugins page.

Step 1.

If you haven’t already, visit “add new” and search for and install the following plugins, an updated list can always be found on my delicious page for other relevant plugins I use and recommend.

Step 2.

Now you want to apply the information in the template to your website pages.  First setup your overall site info by going to “All in One SEO” under “Settings”

then Enabling the Plugin, adding your Home page Title, Meta-Description and Meta-Keywords from the template into the form and scrolling down to “Update Options”

This should change your “Permalinks” settings too, which changes the way your URLs look when you visit your pages.  If you go to your website and the URLs look something like “http://www.yoursite.com.au/?pageid=2″ then click here to see how to change this manually.

Step 3.

For each of the pages you want people to find you will need to update the details as per the template

Set the Page Title, Automatically updates the H1 and URL

Maybe you want to edit the Permalink / URL Click “Edit”

Edit the URL

Now add the Meta-Description and Meta-Keywords for the page.  You will notice if you scroll down below the text editor in WordPress, you have a new module that looks like this:

Edit your Title, Description and Keywords in this module

Once you have done this for each of your pages you are almost finished.

Below are a couple of important web based tools to keep track of all this hard work you have done, and improve it over time.

Google Analytics

So now you are a bit more savvy in SEO, a quick word on using Analytics to understand how people find you is worth mentioning.  This is a great tool to keep track of what is happening on your site and how people are finding you – ie. testing out that the theories work

Once installed into your website, you can login to Google Analytics and see what pages people are looking at and for how long.  What pages people are leaving on and where they are coming from – ie. referrals from other websites or keywords used to find you on Google.

This is a free service from Google, and totally easy to install.

You have installed GA for WordPress already so the next step is to create an Analytics account and Site and then add it to your WordPress template:

Step 1.

Login to Google Analytics and add a new account

Create a new Google Analytics "account"

Step 2.

You will get to a screen that looks like this, you need to copy the UA number as below

Copy your site UA number - Unique Address

Step 3.

Now you need to update your WordPress site with the UA number

Goto “Settings>Google Analytics”

1. Select Manually Enter your UA Code

2. Paste your UA code into the box

3. Select “Update Google Analytics Settings”

Update Analytics

Google Webmaster

Another great free Google Tool is webmaster.  If you list your SiteMap on this site, you might not only improve your site’s page rank, but also Google might choose to setup sitelinks which is a great.

Google Sitelinks

This is another Analysis tool, as you get more familiar with it, it will be more useful to you.

But here are the basics:

Step 1.

On your website go to “Settings>XML-Sitemap”

If you haven’t got a sitemap, then click “rebuild the sitemap manually”

Then when this finishes successfully, click on “sitemap” and Copy the URL, this is your sitemap URL.

Step 2.

Then visit Google webmaster tools and Login and Create a site

Add new Webmaster Site

Step 3.

Tell Google where your sitemap is by following these steps

Add sitemap to Google WT

Step 4.

Advanced users might like to add a Robots.txt file to your site, to ensure Google doesn’t index some of your pages – if you would like to see how to do this, click here