SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)
WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION?
Search
engine optimisation or SEO as it otherwise
known is the process of ensuring that your website is visible to the search engines
such as Google, MSN and Yahoo.
There are two parts to search engine optimisation, on-page optimisation and off-page
optimisation. It should be noted that search engine optimisation will only affect
what is known as organic search results (these are the results listed 1 to 10 on
a search results page) and not paid or sponsored links such as those from Google
AdWords.
The first thing to note when optimising a site is to make sure that the page content
(copy) makes sense when read aloud. The copy should also be informative and relevant
and at a minimum consist of 300-500 words with a mention of the key terms within
the copy both at the beginning and end of the text. We all want to be number 1 in
the google search engine and after all some one will always take the top spot for
a search. However if the copy is written only for the benefit of search engines,
and not for the humans browsing through the site, then the search engine ranking
is meaningless as people will immediately leave the site and look at the second,
third or even fourth results.
It should be remembered that the main purpose of a search engine is to provide
relevant meaningful search results. So the job of optimisation is to make sure that
your copy is relevant to the searches that people will perform.
In this guide we will cover the following that is essential for good
search engine
optimisation.
- Keyword Research
- Page Titles
- Effective Use Of Header Tags
- Meta Tags
- Web Standards
- Emphasizing Text
- Url Naming
- Deep Linking
- Robots.txt File
- Sitemap.xml File
- Back Links
- Blogs
WHAT DOES GOOGLE HAVE TO SAY ABOUT THE MATTER?
We'd like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost
on what's best for the visitors of your site. They're the main consumers of your
content and are using search engines to find your work. Focusing too hard on specific
tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver
the desired results. Search engine optimization is about putting your site's best
foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines.
Please read on for further details of effective search engine optimisation.
ON-PAGE OPTIMISATION
What is on-page optimisation?
On-page optimisation is the process of making sure that your website's content (copy)
has the best visibility to the search engines. The text below explains the various
techniques you can use to enhance your websites on-page optimisation.
A web page has several parts to its structure and this includes a head and a body
section. The head section contains the page title and the meta tags that tell the
search engines various information such as the page's keywords and description of
the content within the page. The body section contains your page headings and page
content.
KEYWORD RESEARCH
The first step of any SEO strategy is identifying your key search terms. That is
identifying what people will type into the search engines to find your site. There
are several tools available that are free or paid for that can help identify suitable
search phrases including free tools from Google.
Keyword research is the most important apsect of an effective SEO campaign because
after all if the keywords that are chosen or assumed as is often the case, then
all the hardwork that is put into on-page optimisation will have been a waste of
time and money, the reason that SEO is undertaken is to drive targeted traffic and
if the chosen search phrase only gets 30 hits a month then the increased traffic
will only be minimal. Search engine optimisation cannot be an afterthought and should
be talked about before any web development is undertaken. This will ensure that
the SEO strategy has the best possible start.
On the other hand picking a keyword that is too competitive may have a negative
impact on the traffic to your site which is why care must be chosen when picking
the keywords. At Breed Creative Solutions we will have an in-depth discussion about
what you feel would be good search keywords and identify whether they would be suitable
or whether they need a bit of refinement. For example the search phrase
Web Design
gets approximately 1 million searches a month in the UK. The search term is highly
competitive and while it would be nice to have around 1 million impressions per
month realistically the level of SEO required each month to be listed and remain
listed on the 1st page would be extremely time consuming. Instead by targeting our
demographic we can maintain a top 3 listing ensuring that any site traffic is interested
in the services that we have to provide.
PAGE TITLES
There can be only one page title per page and it may not contain links or text formatting.
According to the W3C governing body an ideal page title should not exceed 64 characters
in length. This will be approximately 10 words which is sufficient enough to convey
the specifics of the page.
A well written page title should contain keywords relevant to the page as it is
one of the most important aspects of good search engine optimisation. Each page
should have a unique page title. When searching on the internet the search engines
will use the title tag as a clickable link to your website. If any words of the
users search query appear in your page title the search engine will bold them. Care
should be taken when writing the title tag not to resort to keyword stuffing and
the text should be relevant enough to drive traffic to the site while giving Google,
MSN and Yahoo enough information to push the site up the search engine ranking placements
(SERPs).
Keywords should be at the forefront of the title tag rather than the organisation
name and without altering the way the title reads avoiding stop words such as in,
and etc. Below are examples of both good and bad title tags.
Bad
Breed Creative Solutions
Breed Creative solutions | Welcome
The above two titles would both make ineffective page titles. They tell the reader
and the search engines nothing about the content of the page while doing nothing
to attract visits to the site.
In summary accurately describe the page's content, use short descriptive titles
and ensure that page titles are unique.
Good
Search Engine Optimisation | Breed Creative Solutions a Web Design Company
Although the above title contains a stop word when read aloud it complements the
sentence and makes sense to the reader.
EFFECTIVE USE OF HEADER TAGS
Heading tags numbered from H1 (most important) through to H6 (least important) provide
readers with a consistent naming of section headings similar to the naming of chapters
in a book. In a large document such as this one it benefits the reader to know what
section they are currently looking at, breaking up the flow of the text and the
search engines will give a little more weighting to the text within the H tags.
When using header tags it is good practice to start with the H1 tag which would
become the main heading in the page. The next heading will then be a H2 then H3
etc. It useful to note that you don't need to use all 6 H tags as is often the case
H1 to H3 usually suffices. This page uses H1 to H4 to convey the page titles.
META TAGS
There are two important meta tags that are added to a page the keywords tag and
the description tag. The description tag gives Google, MSN and Yahoo valuable summary
information as to the pages content. Where the title tag is relatively brief the
description tag is generally a couple of sentences or a paragraph of text. The description
is used in summary on the search engine's results page under the clickable title
tag. The description tag should where possible be unique to each page as it will
tell potential visitors what that page contains and when written well will drive
visitors to the site.
The keyword tag is used to tell the search engines what the key phrases are of the
site. As mentioned previously care should be taken not to resort to keyword stuffing.
It is generally recommended to have no more than 3 keywords / phrases in this tag
and they should be seperated by commas.
It is worth noting that neither of these meta tags have any bearing on your
ranking in the major search engines. The description meta tag is an ideal opportunity
to increase click through rates (CTR) with a powerfully worded introduction to the page and therefore the potential to drive traffic should not be underestimated.
WEB STANDARDS
Although not necessarily essential for search engine rankings it will definitely
help and adhering to web standards will ensure that all visitors to your site have an almost identical experience.
Even though Internet Explorer may still
have the majority share of the web browser market more and more people are starting
to use alternate browsers including FireFox, Opera, Safari and Google Chrome. Adhering
to web standards also makes it easier for the search engines to find and index (store)
your pages content as well as making the site look more professional.
EMPHASIZING TEXT
Another useful way to tell the search engines what is important is to emphasize
certain key phrases in your website copy. You can emphasize text in
various ways including bold, italic and underline.
This tells the search engines that the text is important and providing that the
technique isn't overused can help to increase the search engine ranking. When emphasizing
text ensure that the emphasized text doesn't look out of place and fits within the
context of the paragraph.
URL NAMING CONVENTIONS
When saving pages it is always a good idea to use the keywords of the page in the
page name. The search engines will pick up on this and give a little extra weight
to the site and it helps the reader understand what the page is about when they
see the site listed in the search engine results.
For example this page is about search engine optimisation and the title of the page
is search engine optimisation however if the page was saved as page.aspx?id=123
then the search engines fail to understand what the page is about and the reader
will fail to understand what the topic of the page actually is.
If you have an e-commerce site with 1000 products and you have one page that displays
details of these products with each product pulled from a database via a numeric
value such as products.aspx?id=1 or products.aspx?id=899 then you a wasting a valuable
SEO opportunity. Urls with question marks in them can often cause problems for the
search engines and may be ignored. By implementing some form of Url ReWriter you
will be able to score extra points and in the process have the search engines think
that your site has over 1000 pages which in reality it does even though they are
actually only served from one physical page. The example would now become products/bycycles.aspx
instead of products.aspx?id=1 or alternatively bycycles/bmx.aspx which would bring
in another keyword. Behind the scenes the web site will know that the url should
point to products.aspx?id=1 and serve the correct page to the reader.
DEEP LINKING
Search engines like to know as much about your site as they possibly can and a way
of helping them along is to link internally to your pages. There are several examples
on this page where we have linked to other pages on our site the only thing to remember
is to put keywords inside of the link. If you have click here or read more or some
other phrase inside of a link it tells the search engines nothing about the page
you are linking to.
Search engines rank pages based on the quality and quantity of incoming links. It
is similar to business referrals. The more referrals a business receives the more
people are casting a vote to say yes this company is good at what ever it is they
happen to do. Search engines want to find relevant content and the more quality
incoming links that a website has the more votes they are receiving that tell the
search engines yes this website has good content. The more votes that you receive
the further up the search engine rankings your site will appear.
It should be noted that link exchanges are a bad idea and should be avoided
at all costs as they will cause a site to be blacklisted by the search engines and
more than likely removed from the search engines index. Focus on obtaining
good quality links only, there are many examples of websites that rank higher
than other websites with less in-bound links because they haven't used a
scattergun approach to their SEO strategy.
ROBOTS.TXT FILE
The robots.txt file is a text file that is placed in the root of a website. The
purpose of the text file is to tell the search engines what they can and cannot
index. For example if you have a client area that you don't want to be indexed you
put an instruction in the file that tells the search engines to ignore that directory.
SITEMAP.XML FILE
The Sitemap.xml file is not the same as a sitemap page. A sitemap page is generally
a page of links that allows readers of the site to see exactly what pages you have
on the site and it is similar to the index pages in a book.
The Sitemap.xml file tells the search engines what pages you have in your site and
is another way to help get the pages in your site indexed quicker and help the search
engines index the site more intelligently. If you have an e-commerce site or a database
driven site that pulls page content from a database it is a good idea to have a
process that dynamically creates the Sitemap.xml file whenever pages are published
or un-published. This ensures that the search engines constantly know which pages
are available on the site.
OFF-PAGE OPTIMISATION
What is off-page optimisation?
Off-page optimisation is the process of ensuring that the website is visible to
the search engines at locations other than the actual website. This includes blogs,
messages posted to forums, social networking such as myspace, facebook and digg
and listing the website in online directories such as the Yahoo business index or
DMOZ.org. When all the on-page optimisation techniques have been exhausted the only
way to increase the search engine ranking of pages is via off-page optimisation
techniques.
BACKLINKS
If you have been following this guide you will know about the importance of keyword
research and the keywords that you have identified will be used in the backlinks
to your site.
You will have now found some relevant business directories and forums in which to
list your website and your services so all that is left is to create an appropriate
link. A good example of a link is Web Design Company | Breed
Creative Solutions. In this example our keywords are clickable and the name of our
business is just outside of the link. This tells the search engines that we are
a web design company and anyone clicking the link will know that we are a web design
company.
BLOGS
Blogs are a good way of pulling in visitors, industries of all sorts blog about
their personal lives and changes in there industry such as legal or technological
changes.
If the reader likes what is written they will be inclined to return to the site
more often thereby driving traffic the other reason is that blogs tend to be developed
with search engines in mind, so a lot of the on-page optimisation is already implemented
such as friendly urls. Linking from the blog to the corporate site gives the corporate
site a vote and as is often the case, when the blog post is informative other blogs
will link to the post increasing the amount of back links.
If you would like further information on how Breed Creative Solutions can create
the perfect SEO campaign for your organisation, please contact us regarding our
search engine optimisation packages on 08456 43 92
43.
Alternatively complete our quote request form for a free no obligation
web design quote.