Sometimes I mention the word SEO to clients and I am immediaitly met with a puzzled look or long pause, whats that?
SEO is short for search engine optimisation, this means optimising your website to give you the best possible chance of performing online, so the next question of course is, how the hell do we do that?
There are some fundamentalsof search engine optimisation that every website should adhere to, I am sure everyone has there own way of doing things, after all SEO is not an exact science, but here is how I do it;
1) Choose a Good Domain Name
When selecting a domain name, try to pick one that is relevant to your website, content and what you think other people will be searching for you under Google. e.g. cheapwebsitedesign.com if you want people to find you under the search term cheap website design.
2) Title Tags
When looking at a website, right at the top you will see a title for the website, not on the page itself, I am talking about the writing right at the top of your website browser, above the URL/address bar. The title tag on your page is one of the most important parts of helping you to acheive a decent rank in search engines. You need to make sure that the title tag relates to the content of your page. So if your page is about Apples then your title tag should also be about apples. If you can include a couple of keywords in your title tag then this is fantastic!
3) Meta Tags
I am sure that many people will say different things about meta tags, the keyword meta tag is rarely used anymore by the majority of search engines and appears to have no direct impact on your ranking in the larger search engines like Google. The description meta tag is however a different kettle of fish, you will see this along with the title tag in search results e.g. when you search Google, the list returned shows a link/title (this is your title tag) and a small description, this is your description meta tag. Just like the Title Tag it is a good idea to try and get a couple of keywords or phrases relating to your web page in there.
4) Content – KeyWord Density
Within your website content, you should try to refer to keywords or phrases that you think people will be searching for online. Search engines will root through your content and total up the number of times each word/phrase displays, so without writing random text or lines and lines of keywords, try to include them as much as you can in relevant places.
5) Heading Tags – H1, H2, H3
Heading tags should be used as titles within the page itself, these should be used in corresponding order e.g H1, being the first heading tag, should be the most important title on your page. Again refering back to Apples, your H1 tag should be…..yep….you guessed it…..Apples.
Then depending on your content, you may have another paragraph about red apples, so your h2 tag should be…..yep……red apples….now your getting it.
You should keep to this structure throught your page an never use more than 1 of each of the heading tags.
6) Alt Tags
Every image that is on your page should have an alt tag, you see, search engines do not have eyes, they can not look at the picture and think, oh thats obiously a picture of an apple tree, so we have to tell them what it is, we do this by using an Alt tag in all of our images
7) Naming Conventions of Images, Navigation & Pages
All images and pages need to have the correct names, again all of your names for any folder or file should be relevant to your website. So for any pictures that I am placing in my main content about Apples, I would ensure that the name of my images related to Apples. e.g. red-apples, green-apples, apple, fresh-apples, anything at all to do with Apples. I want to fo the same with my pages too, the homepage obviously has to be index.htm but for the other pages we can name them anything we like, so be sure to name them something relevant to the content on the page.
I might have index.htm for my homepage, red-apples.htm for my page about red apples, green-apples.htm for my page about green apples etc.
The links in your navigation to these pages should also be search engine friendly, such as HOME | GREEN APPLES | RED APPLES
Our overall goal that we are trying to acheive is to make sure that all elements of SEO are related to each other, all titles, h1, content etc reflect the same or similar things (in this case Apples) so that when a search engine visits your website they can clearly determine what your website is about. But presenting your content in this way will give you the best possible chance of perming well in search engines.
8 ) Start A Blog Relevant to Your Industry
Having a blog on your website is a great way to build up more content, as long as you adhere to the above guidlines of course! By adding relevant articles to your website will mean that more pages on your website are indexed and more people will visit your website as a result of articles on your blog. Hopefully if you blog is relevant then these people will click through to your main website from the articles.
9) Build Up Links
So I think that around 20% – 30% of why you appear where you do in Google is done to the above points I have raised, however I beleive that the other 70% – 80% is down to the amount of other websites linking back to you. You need to get your website out there, into as many relevant directories, search engines, blogs, social networks as possible. The more links the better! and the more relevant the website the better!
When creating your link or asking people to link to you, make sure that the link itself is a keyword or phrase that you want to associate with your business, do not simply use your domain name.
Definate DONTS of SEO
Over populate key words
Duplicate content
Hide links in your backgound
Use URL’s such as www.youdomain.com/shop?productID2211233
IE6, well, was a browser with fresh features when it first came out but it is currently 8 years old (must be about 160 human years).
