My partner in Dublin, Ireland, Micheal O Donnabhain, was asked to make a presentation to his business networking group recently, and the subject he was to present was search engine optimization basics. Three group members had volunteered their websites for a quick review, and we evaluated their sites using just four of the far more than four SEO considerations – Micheal had to keep his remarks to about 20 minutes.

Those four site elements were: page title, meta description, headings, and word count/keyword density. So that we could make sure everyone was on the same page, we offered a definition of “keyword”: a word or phrase a person was likely to use when searching for a web site’s product or service for which the site would want to be a high-ranked result.

Past columns to this blog have addressed the importance of page title, meta description, headings and word count/keyword density, and they can be reviewed in the Web Copy Writing/SEO category if you’re interested. What I want to talk about today is the self test we gave the group at the end of the presentation – – our idea for a good “take-a-way” from the meeting. I’d like to offer it for you to take on your own, and don’t worry – – it’s easy, quick, and there’s no follow-up quiz for you.

Pretend for a moment you are not you, and you don’t know your web site exists. Instead, you are a person looking for the real you and your web site, and the product or service you sell. You are that person sitting in front of your computer ready to conduct a search on Google or Yahoo or Bing or one of the other search engines to find the real you.

Make a list of the words or phrases you would enter in the search field to find the product or service you promote and sell on your web site. Write three or four search phrases that occur to you. Remember, now, you aren’t you, and you don’t know your web site exists – – all you know is the product or service you want to find.

Then, with that list in front of you, go to your web site and look at your page title, your meta description, your headings and your home page content. If you don’t find the keywords from your list in any or all of those places, and in the right frequency, you have some serious work to do on your site. If those keywords aren’t there, it’s not likely anyone is going to find you in their search.

There’s a lot more to SEO than this simple test, but it’s a good start. It’s a worthwhile exercise, and it will be very instructive for you.

Tags: search engine optimisation, SEO

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Web Copywriting/SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.