It is not always cost effective or possible, to advertise with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising such as Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing, but everyone can do their bit to help increase the effectiveness of their company or personal website in a search engines natural listings. We have constructed the list below to offer some helpful pointers regarding optimising your own site.
Meta Information
Meta Tags are bits of code, invisible to the visitors to your site, that sit at the top of each page in a website. They contain information such as keywords and phrases, descriptions of the website itself and what text to display in the title bar of the browser. Search engines place different levels of importance on this sort of information - for example Google is rumoured to pay little attention whereas Yahoo and AltaVista pay strong attention. Regardless of Googles position on these tags you should still ensure they are a part of your website in order to assist with your ranking in other search engines. The main Meta Tags that are used are:
- Keywords
This tag should contain keywords and phrases relating to your website. By placing yourself in the position of your customers you can easily figure out what sorts of words to include here. You should also ensure that around 65% of the words you include in this section are readable text on the site (i.e. a visitor reading the page in question can actually read these words within the website copy). Try not to repeat keywords more than 3 or 4 times within the meta tag on each page as this can be considered “Keyword Spamming” and you can be penalised by search engines for it.
- Description
This should be a short sentence that describes the page in question. Again you should try to include a good amount of keywords within this tag.
- Title
This tag controls the text that appears in the title bar of the browser, and in Google for example, it translates as the blue linked text when your website appears in a search. You should ensure that this tag contains a plentiful amount of keywords and phrases. You should also include the name of your site in this tag and perhaps also the name of the page, but before that you should have the keywords. For example, instead of having “Welcome to Pom Design | Web design Somerset for content management and ecommerce services” etc, you should have “Web design Somerset for content management and ecommerce services | Welcome to Pom Design“.
There are other Meta tags that hold information such as copyright ownership and information that tells search engine “spiders” when to come and re-check the site for new content. These are best implemented by your web designers, or alternatively you can contact us via our website and we would be happy to offer some free advice.
Website Content
The readable content on your website is probably the most important aspect of search engine optimisation. Google places a lot of importance on this and uses it as the main source for keyword retrieval. You should ensure that you include your selected keywords and phrases within the text on each page and try to repeat them around 3 or 4 times (for every 3 or so paragraphs of text). Search engines also place more importance on words found at the start of website copy, so you should try to include the more keyword rich content at the start. Finally, bold text can be considered more relevant by search engines so where possible this can be used. Above all, you should maintain a readable and cohesive structure to your copy - there is no point in working on drawing people to your website only to turn them away because they cant make sense of the text!
Website Build
Separating content from design very important for making the search engines job as easy as possible. They are only interested in certain parts of the code that makes your website what it is, and by using modern methods such as external CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to control the formatting and layout of the site you can do exactly this. By using this method you leave only the most relevant content information in the page itself creating a less “bloated” site and allowing search engine spiders to quickly and easily crawl your site and extract what they need. You should check with your web designer that they are using these methods to build your site.
Link Building / Back Links
Possibly the most important aspect of SEO is link building. This is effectively building up as many links as possible to your website on as many other websites as you can. This can be achieved through submitting your site to various directories and related websites and is something you should continue to maintain for the life of your site. Additionally the higher ranked the sites that link to you are, the more effective this link will be for your SEO campaign. A basic explanation of the logic behind this is explained below:
- A customer types in a search term in Google, for example.
- Google runs through its index of sites that match the search term entered.
- Google then looks at each site returned from the search and how many links that sites has to it on other sites in its directory.
- Google will look at each of these sites that link to your site, and register how highly ranked they are.
- A combination of the amount of links there are and the ranking of the source of these links is used to ascertain how relevant your site is (i.e. if there is 1 link to your site then you site cannot be particularly relevant, but if there are 500 sites linking to your site, including the BBC and CNN, then your sites content must be of high value and you will be deemed more relevant).
This is a very simple explanation of the process and by no means exactly how search engines work, in fact search engines do not tell anyone exactly how they work and they are constantly changing, but it does show the importance of link building for your site.
Domain Name
The domain name that you select is obviously important, and is something that you should put a lot of thought into. The obvious requirements for a domain name are that they should be short, snappy and memorable. When choosing either a .co.uk or .com domain you should consider your target market. If you are aiming your site at an international market then go for a .com, if you are targeting the UK then we would advise going for a .co.uk domain name. On top of this you should try to include keywords within the domain name itself. For example if you are selling Retro T-Shirts then the domain www.retrot-shirts.com would be a good one to select. A name like www.RTS.com would however not be so useful as it contains no keywords relating to your site. This can be a difficult task when coupled with find available domain names, but something you should put thought into.
Other Info
As well as the above, you should ask your web designers about including other search engine specific information such as robots.txt files, and checking the site for broken links. These can be done very easily and take very little time for someone to carry out for you.
For more information regarding SEO and SEO services you can visit us at www.pomdesign.com where we can offer a full, extremely cost effective SEO management package for your business.
admin | 
05 20th, 2008| 