Hints and Tips for Successful Search Engine Optimisation
1. Write your copy for the web - Whilst you must always write copy for your web pages that are focused on being ‘customer friendly’ you should also make sure that your site is also ‘search engine friendly’. In particular you should ensure that you keywords are emphasised in your text as far as possible whilst maintaining easy to read copy. Ideally start and finish the first paragraph with you keyword or key phrase and try and ensure that your keywords appear as often as possible in your text.
2. Only be as technically clever with your site as you have to be - If possible develop your site using static HTML coding – search engine spiders are able to ‘crawl’ the content of such static HTML sites far more easily than content that is delivered dynamically. If you have to use dynamically generated content then try to steer clear of using long query strings, the longer the string the less likely that the page will be ‘visible’ to a crawler based search engine.
3. Think about your site ‘navigation’ system - Make sure that you site has a clear hierarchy and that every page can be navigated to from at least one static text link.
Many websites use navigation systems with drop down menus. Whilst drop down menus may look good from a design perspective and they do offer powerful functionality, at the time of writing, they are not usually search engine friendly. They typically use JavaScript code that cannot be crawled by spiders and hence they cannot follow the links to other pages in the site.
4. Make sure that you have a site map - Site maps are very important for search engine spiders, so create a site map and make sure that every page on your site links to it – this will not only help the web crawlers it is also very user friendly for visitors to your site.
5. Use your Title Tags and Meta Tags wisely - The use of your keywords in the HTML title tag of your web page is a vital element of search engine optimisation. Google in particular appears to pay particular attention to the title tag of a page when determining the relevance of the page to a particular search term. These title tags appear in search engine listings so it is critical to make the wording snappy and to the point. Titles need to be relatively short and a recommended maximum is 70 characters including spaces – this should be long enough to get in your critical keywords.
There are a number of different types of meta tag but the most important for search engine indexing are the Description Meta Tag and the Keywords Meta Tag. The Keywords Meta Tag is now given a lot less weight by search engines but it is still an important element to get right. Some search engines use the Description Meta Tag to show the searcher a summary of the pages content so it is a useful opportunity to demonstrate your relevance as well.
6. Be careful with the way you use text and images - Avoid using images to represent text, particularly keywords or navigation links. Most web crawlers cannot ‘read’ the text contained within an image so if it is important text to your site it will be invisible to search engines. The same goes for Flash, which again must be avoided for navigation unless a static HTML link is also provided.
Where you do use images, make sure that you use ‘alt attributes’ on the images that put them into context – this is also necessary to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act obligations for websites.
7. Use every page as a mini site within the site - To optimise the visibility of your site and maximise the exposure of your keywords and key phrases to search engines, treat each major page within your site as a mini site with its own Title Tag, Description Meta Tag and Keyword Meta Tags.
8. Think about your site structure - Where possible avoid using frames and framesets in your site design as these are particularly unfriendly to web crawlers. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be used very effectively to streamline your HTML code making faster to download your pages whilst increasing keyword density and improving page design.
9. Don’t Spam - Resist the temptation to use spamming techniques such as Keyword Stuffing; Hidden Text; Hidden Links or Link Farming. If you use these techniques then there is a strong possibility that your site will be blacklisted.
10. Reciprocal links - Having plenty of high quality links pointing to and from your site has the benefit of providing traffic from other sites and it can also boost your search engine traffic. Google in particular relies on link popularity as a key part of the way in which it ranks the relevance of web pages to search terms.
Google uses a system called the Google PageRank in its assessment of relevance – it is a measure of link popularity and it measures the number and quality of incoming links to your site. The better your linking strategy the better your visibility.
The quality of the links is all important here, where possible get links from sites with a strong page ranking for your products and services.