Are you just starting out in Search Engine Optimisation, or maybe you just want to have a go at optimising your web site. Take a look at the steps below to give yourself a basic ground to build on.
Firstly, think about why your need to optimise your site. What is the purpose of getting your site to the top of the search engines. The easy answer is because you want to increase the traffic that visits your web site, but what do you want people to do once they visit you? Register for newsletters, buy products or services, create profiles and submit information?
Next think about they keywords that people might use to find a web site like your own. Once you have brain stormed a list of around 30 head on over to the Google Keyword Tool or sign up for a Wordtracker account to see just how often these search terms are used and how competitive they are.
Once you have chosen your keywords use them to conduct a Google search and make a note of your competiton. These sites will be your benchmark in terms of what you want to acheive.
Then you need to optimise the pages of your web site. It’s important that you understand that you are optimising web pages, and not the web site. You should, ideally, be dedicating each page to a specific topic or key word/phrase . The plan is to make each page an authority on that topic as far as the search engines go. First, focus on the following areas of the page;
The Title Tag – Put your keyword first, and then write a short sentance that relates to the content on the page. Do not use more than 70 characters in the Title Tag.
Description Tag – Write a short sentance that describes the content of the web page. Make sure to use your keyword / phrases as close to the start of the sentance as possible. Remember that this is what is also shown in the search engines results as a description of the page. Don’t just cram this with keywords, but make it engaging and give the search user a reason to click through to your site. We recommend no more than 155 characters in the description tag.
Keyword Tag - Although technically we are told that this tag isn’t used for SEO these days we still do this as a matter of practice. Afterall, we dont actually know for sure that this META tag is now redundant. Use around 7-10 keywords here. Again avoid cramming as it could be seen as SPAM.
Finally think about the content of your page. Make sure that your content headings are formatted using the correct h tags. Use <h1> for major headings, <h2> for sub-headings etc etc. <h1> Tags are given a greater weighting in terms of relevance. Where possible make use of your keywords in the headings. Then write the content of the page for real people, not the search engines. Make sure that you use your keywords / phrases a few times, but don’t ruin the content by overuse. It’s also good practice to <b> or <strong> (bold) your keywords. Google picks up on this and marks it as an important phrase on the page.
Where you use hyperlinks to other pages, always make use of the title=”insert keyword here” tag and always use keywords as your anchor text.
Following these rules / tips will give you a solid grounding in getting your web pages optimised. The next step is to start to build up your back links. More on that another time.
