Improving search engine performance
What is SEO?
Search engine performance is all about how search engines rank your web site for particular keywords and phrases and, therefore, the position your site will appear when a search for those words/phrases is conducted.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of modifying or building a website so that it is considered to be “search engine friendly”.
“SEO will depend on how carefully you structure your site around your chosen keywords - select them carefully”
There are several key elements:
“Keyword selection” is the essential part, and the one that underpins all the other elements of SEO. Surprisingly it is often overlooked or, at best, is given consideration as an afterthought and with less gravity as some of the other elements, namely: copy, links, tags and general architecture
How search engine friendly is your website?
FREE WEBSITE REVIEW
Keyword selection
Before you begin to develop your website, research keywords and phrases that are most appropriate. There are online tools that can help you with this process – eg. Yahoo’s Search Suggestion tool, Google’s keyword tool, Microsoft adCenter labs, keyword Discovery and Wordtracker.
Pages or sections of your web site should focus on a small number of the keywords you have identified so that they become “keyword rich” and have a higher density than words or phrases that are deemed of lesser importance.
Links
Search engines generally like the idea of links, and inbound ones in particular, so if you are able to achieve inbound links from popular web sites that focus on similar, complementary keywords to those your site is built around. This can be an onerous task but will, if done properly, have a positive impact on your overall ranking.
Architecture
Whatever steps you take to improve your site’s performance with search engines, the results will be greatly diminished if your site design is not ”search engine friendly”
Tags
Spend more time putting adding keywords to title tags (which should be unique for each page of your web site) than into the others although this doesn’t mean the description and keywords tags should be ignored since, despite being of little SEO value, some search engines display the description meta-tag on their search results pages.
The title tags are checked by the search engines for consistency with the copy within that particular page, and better ranking results will be achieved by restricting the number of keywords you are targeting to single figures for each page / section.
Consideration should also be given to including keywords within the “alt” and “header” tags to assist with SEO.
Copy
Add fresh content on a regular basis to the Web site. Generally speaking, the more frequently content is added to a web site, the more frequently search engine spiders will visit and index accordingly.
Respect the search engines and the way they operate. Don’t try to fool them by over-using keywords within copy, or attempting to hide them in some way. This could have disastrous results.
