Search Engine Optiminisation
Search engine optimisation is the
process by which a website is prepared and altered to make it as compatible as possible with search
engines such as Google, Yahoo and Ask.
Search engines are constantly evolving
and changing the importance they place on the different aspects of a website. To be sure that your site
is as optimised as possible you can do no harm in applying all of the following techniques but you may
be able to find more. If in any doubt or you are not sure about how to apply some of the techniques
you can always seek professional advice. Below are some ideas to get you started on Search Engine Optimisation.
- Structure
and Layout
A good structure to your website will ensure it will be picked up by
search engines. By ensuring your website is structured in such a way a search engine can crawl
through your website to index and catelogue it into its database which is then searched web users. - Up-to-Date
Your
website must be kept as up-to-date as possible, not only does this ensure the web user gets accurate
information but regular updates will encourage web crawlers and people to visit the site.
Other
things that improve search engine optimisation:
- Use of page titles
– Add keywords in to relevant page titles i.e. ‘Worcestershire Tourism’
- Use of heading
tags (h1, h2, h3 etc.) – Add keywords in to relevant headings i.e. ‘Worcestershire Tourism’ as the main
heading in a h1 tag
- Use of strong tags to emphasise keywords
- Use
of meta tags to include keywords and site / page descriptions
- Google & Yahoo
sitemaps – these can be used to keep an eye on what pages are being indexed in your site and any problems
a search engine has accessing pages. You can also expose database results from searches and things like
that and give some indication as to how often the content is updated
- Clean URLs –
Instead of URLs that contain ?ID=36567&Type=11 at the end you can generate URLs that contain relevant
text for the content that is on the page
- Relevant link text for links
- Titles
on links
- Relevant alt and title text on images
Things
that can improve search engine ranking:
- Links – (adapted from
your text). The more links you can have on other websites in to yours, the more likely you are to get
a better search engine ranking. This is especially relevant if the websites that link to you are of
a similar topic or content. There are a number of online directories that can link to your site. Using
these may increase your site
traffic:
The Small Business Portal
The
Business Directory
Yell - Consider creating
a page about your business on sites such as www.wikipedia.org