SEO or search engine optimisation is the process by which you ensure that your site is properly ‘optimised’ so that it appears prominently in a search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo or Bing) for specific search terms or keywords that users might type.
SEO basically tries to make sure that whenever someone searches for words related to your business, you appear nice and high up in the search engine listings.
With the majority of people using only the top two links they get back from a search, the importance of being no. 1 or 2 is huge. Just think, when was the last time you clicked through to the second page of listings on Google?
SEO is tricky though, because the search engines use complicated algorithms to determine where sites come in their listings. What is more, the search engines don’t tell anyone what is or isn’t important.
However, over the years, mainly by experimentation or trial and error, SEO experts have grown wise to the various things that Google does or doesn’t like.
It is for these reasons however, that SEO is not a precise science and what works one time, may not work in the same way another time. There are however, some simple steps you can take to begin optimising your site. The good news is that these will also make your website more user friendly!
- Create or build a site map – a site map is a page on your website that links to all the pages on the site in a clear orderly fashion. Search engines use links to find new pages and having the all in one place makes it easy for them to index every part of your site. Here is a handy guide about how to create a site map
- Make your page titles and meta descriptions stand out – the title and description of your site that you see when you come up in web searches is actually taken from the HTML code that makes up your site, specifically, the title and meta description tags. You can therefore say anything you like here and it’ll come up in the search engines. It’s therefore important to really sell your site here to convince searchers to click through. Remember to use all your important keywords too. If you don’t know how to find and/or edit your title or description tags, your web designer will be able to do this for you very easily
- Get some links – this is a slightly tricky one, but it is pretty much accepted that the number of links you have from other websites to your site will help your SEO, especially if the links come from very well ‘respected’ sites. Getting links is tricky though and the process of ‘reciprocal’ links (i.e. I’ll link to you if you link to me) is now frowned upon by the search engines. Creating a blog or news section and filling it with lots of interesting content is a great way to get other people linking to your site for example
- Use ‘alt’ tags on images – if you have a site that has lots of images, check that your web designer has used alt tags to description what the image is. The search engine spiders aren’t able to tell what images are, but in HTML you can use the ‘alt’ text to describe the image. Remember to include your keywords where possible
- Write good SEO-friendly copy – in the past, it was easy to write copy that was crammed full of keywords and then do quite well in SEO. Times have changed however and this is now not the case. It is still important to include keywords, but they should be used sparingly – only a few times on each page for example. At the end of the day, your copy should always be written for your users first and the search engines second
What have we missed? What other good SEO tips have you found?
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