Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is simply the process of making your website search engine friendly. In doing so, your site will be displayed further up search results and therefore help you to be found by Internet users. SEO potentially improves the volume and quality of traffic to your web site from search engines.

Keywords

Keywords play an important part in all aspects of your site. A keyword (or phrase) is simply an important word (or phrase) that people will use to search for your site.

Consider the potential level of competition your keywords will have. For example, website designer will return many millions of results but Website Designer Hull will greatly narrow the search. The Google Keyword Tool will show the approximate search volume for your keywords and help suggest possible alternatives.

There are many different areas within your site that you should pay attention to, and use keywords in:

Page Heading

Set when adding or editing a page, the page heading is displayed in your content at the top of your page so it shouldn't really be too long in order to be aesthetically pleasing. This is also the page title which appears at the very top of your Internet browser window. It should be short but descriptive. The use of a keyword or phrase would be ideal.

Bad - 'Welcome to our site' - this won't mean an awful lot to Google
Better - 'Welcome to Yorkshire Rose - Property Quick Buy Specialists'

Bad - 'Our Services' - again, rather meaningless
Better - 'Help and Advice to Stop Repossession'

This applies to all aspects of keywords so bear this in mind throughout the rest of your site.

Menu Name

Set when adding or editing a page. Search Engines view links in pages, both the menu and page content (read more below), as important. Try to use a keyword in the menu if possible but beware, don't get to complecated or your customers won't have a clue what the menu titles means!

URL

Set when adding or editing a page, the URL is the last part of web page's address (at the top of your browser) e.g. this page's url is 'seo'. The url must be unique. If you use more than one word, separate them with an underscore e.g. about_us.

Consider using something short but descriptive using a couple of keywords if possible. For example, we could have set this pages URL to 'search_engine_optimisation'.

Meta Tags

Keywords - Can be either set as default to be displayed on every page or over-written on individual pages. See meta tags for more information. This can be any word or phrase an Internet user might search for in order to find a website or page. You should limit this to around 150 characters, roughly 20 words.

Description - Can be either set as default to be displayed on every page or over-written on individual pages. See meta tags for more information. The description is the information that is displayed immediately after the main link on many search engine results so it should be a brief and concise summary of your page's content. You should aim for around 20 or 30 words. A reasonable guide would be a paragraph of text or a couple of short sentences.

How Useful Are Meta Tags Really?

There are some experts that suggest Meta Tags are not important in optimisation and indeed, we have tested this by not including this information on our own site for a period of almost 4 months. Although we have not studied this in other Search Engines, we found no real diference in our rankings with Google.

However, the option to include them exists, both on the Content Management System and all commercially available web design software. They are not particularly difficult to include during the set up of your pages so we feel you should seriously consider using them. Even though Google didn't seem too bothered in our little test, some Search Engines do make use of this information and not everyone uses Google. We think Meta Tags should be used as standard practice.

Page Copy

Copy is the content of your page, it can include links, text and images.

Links - Search Engines view links in pages as important. For example 'read more' doesn't mean anything to a search engine. Consider using a keyword or phrase instead such as 'Read more about 'editing your own web site' where the link is on important words.

Text - Text within your web page can be displayed as either a heading or paragraph text. For more information, please read about formatting content but essentially a heading is seen by search engines as more important than a paragraph. That's not to say they don't view the paragraph text as important, they simply prioritise the headings first. The formatting content page explains how to specify a piece of text is a heading. You should make use of this prioritisation by including keywords within your headings to further enhance the importance of specific words.

Paragraphs should be consise and informative but again, you should make use of keywords.

Images - Whilst uploading and inserting images, be sure to include an image description, using a keyword(s) when possible. The images page will explain how to do this.

The Golden Rules

Keep it simple and if it reads like proper, plain English, you won't go far wrong!

Over doing any of these techniques runs the risk of upsetting the search engines and being banned from their search results.

Stuffing a dozen keywords into a sentence will sound rubbish so don't do it!

Write your page content for your visitors, not the search engines.

A site with well written copy and basic optimisation will perform, in most cases, better than you'd expect. Use the techniques above to get the basics in place then sit back for a while, give it time to work. You may be pleasantly surprised and it could save you a small fortune.

Be as specific as possible.

The topic/content on each page will be specific to that page, so try to do the same with your keywords.

If your pages have mulitple topics on a page, it would follow you would have several different keywords on that page.

The alternative would be to split your pages into topic specific pages, but of course, the trade off is more pages for your customers to read and search through so think about the balance carefully.

We realise that these techniques may not suit every business. You may not have the luxury of time or your business may be critically dependent on achieving and maintaining maximum online sales. Please contact us for a detailed consultation and a quote for an advanced online marketing plan.