So, you’ve built your new website. It looks great. All polished and shiny. Cool graphics, good layout, and no broken links. Everything works just as it should do. Or does it? It takes a lot more than shine and gleam to get your website listed with the major search engines.
Search engine optimisation is critical in louring the traffic to your website. Of course there are all sorts of tips and tricks that you can do to bring visitors to your site, but optimising your website is by far the best thing that you can do, otherwise your website risks never being found amongst the millions of results that the major search engines return.
So how do you go about optimising your website? What are the things that you should be thinking about when designing your site and making it search engine friendly?
Title Tag
The title tag is one of the most important pieces of information on your website. It creates the words that appear at the top of the browser window, and are also used as the clickable link in the description that the search engine result page displays. This tag should include the most relevant keywords that relate to your products or services.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are placed within the <Head> </Head> tags of your website. There are many Meta tags that you can use, but they are not used by the search engines as much as they used to for page ranking. They are still important though as they provide the ‘spiders’ with information about your website and they can back up specific keywords used in the body content of your site.
Meta Description Tag - <Meta name=”description” content=”your site description”>
The Description tag is used by the search engines to summarise your website. It should contain a short paragraph (up to 200 characters) summarising your products or services related to that page.
Meta Keywords Tag - <Meta name=”keywords” content=”list of keywords”>
The Keywords tag is used by search engines to help them to index your site. The words found within this tag let the ‘spiders’ know what queries or search terms your webpage will be indexed under. These keywords should also be used within the body content of your webpage. Beware not to use words that bare no relevance to, your site, product or service. The ranking of your website can be negatively affected as search engines can penalise you for this.
Meta Robots Tag - Meta name=”robots” content=”index follow”>
Meta name=”robots” content=”no index no follow”>
The Robots tag is used to tell the ‘spiders’ which pages you want to index, and which you don’t. This is usually set to “index follow” as you usually want your entire site indexed, but if you have pages buried deep within your website that use frames and contain no navigation, the user will have no way of navigating away from that page if they enter your site from an obscure point.
Content
This is VERY important. Providing plenty of textual information is a key factor when developing a really good website. This content should contain all of the keywords used in the Meta keyword tag, plus lots more. The more specific you can be when describing your products or services the better. Frequency of keywords also helps, but don’t use too many. If you fill your page with keywords, the search engines thinks you are spamming and pushes your website further down the rankings. Another thing to remember when writing copy is to think about the technical abilities of the user. The casual user may know nothing about your products or services and may use obscure search terms within the search engines. Whereas a user who uses your products or services more frequently may know all the technical terms, and search using those expressions. So make sure that you cater for all users, or you could loose potential business.
HTML, CSS and Images
Make sure your coding is up to scratch. There is no excuse for bad coding. Empty or redundant code makes your website look unprofessional. Check and remove anything that doesn’t look right.
Use Cascading Style Sheets. CSS gives website developers more control over the layout and the display of web pages and can greatly reduce the amount of code required to produce the page, resulting in faster page loading time.
Make sure all images have been optimised for the web before using them within your web page. The larger the image, the slower your page will load. The slower it loads, the more impatient the user will get. On average, a user will wait no longer than 15 seconds for a page to download before they hit the back button and look elsewhere. Also, don’t forget to use the ‘Alt’ attribute for all your images. Search engines can’t index images, but they can index the text within ‘Alt’ attributes. The header of your page with your company name and logo is usually an image and is also one of the first things the search engine finds on your page. Use your company name for example on your logo images ‘Alt’ attribute, then if someone searches for your company name, it will be near the top of every page on your site. Navigation is also important. You can make really impressive roll over effects and Flash animations for your internal and external links, but ‘spiders’ can’t read images and can’t follow image links. If the only way of navigating your website is with image links, you’re in trouble. The ‘spiders’ may not index any page at all. Always make sure that there are text links somewhere on your page
There are still other things you can do to drive traffic to your website in your quest for Search Engine Optimisation, but if you start with these, you’re on your way.
Good luck
Martin Bradley
Why your organisation needs a website
In this age of electronic communication, more and more consumers are turning to the internet to purchase products or services in the comfort and convenience of their own homes.
Navigating the Complex World of Web Hosting: A Comprehensive Guide
Choosing the right web hosting service is crucial for the success of your website. This guide will help you understand the various aspects of web hosting, including storage space, bandwidth, email solutions, security, and database support, ensuring you make an informed decision that aligns with your business needs.
Choosing Effective Domain Names
Choosing an effective domain name is just as important as choosing a company name or even the line of business itself. There are a number of guidelines that you must adhere to that we will look at, but apart from those, you have total control and artistic license to create whatever domain name you wish. But will it work for you, or against you.
