Five tips for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
August 12, 2010 6:59 pm marketing and sellingSearch engine optimization (SEO) or how to market your website
To get your website listed on the first page of Google, after someone types in a search word, is the ultimate way to market your website. But how do you achieve this? The answer is to make sure your website incorporates techniques that make a first page Google listing more likely to happen. This is known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Here are five tips for SEO:
1. Submit your website link to search engines for SEO
- You can submit your website link to search engines. This is worth doing just to make sure they know you exist.
- To submit a link to Google go to: Submit a website link to Google
- To submit your link to the Yahoo! Directory go to: Yahoo! Directory They charge a fee for submission, which isn’t refundable and you may still not get in!
2. Think before redesigning your website or changing your webspace provider
- You need to think about the affects of redesigning your website or moving it to another location (ie changing your webspace provider). Your listing on a search engine could be temporarily affected by this.
- If you redesign a website with a different page structure, search engine listings will point to pages that don’t exist anymore. It may take a while for your website to be indexed accurately again.
3. Make a site map to ensure SEO
- Making a site map not only aids navigation for visitors, but allows search engine spiders to reach all your pages. A search engine spider isn’t something that you find trapped in the bath, it’s an automated program that trawls through pages on the internet, indexing as it goes. And when information from your website is indexed, it means it will appear in search engine listings. What a clever search engine spider it is! However, if your website is designed in Flash or doesn’t have easily identifiable navigation the spider may ignore some of the content of your site and therefore it won’t get indexed.
- A search engine spider sees your website like a screen reader does, i.e. just text and nothing else. So all the flashing gismos and cool imagery on your website are invisible to search engines spiders.
- To see what the search engine spiders see try: Lynx Viewer, which shows web pages without layout and images.
4. Avoid using frames on your website for the best SEO
- When I say avoid using frames for SEO, I don’t mean the type that you put around a painting. You will need to brief your web designer to avoid using frames, if you are not designing the website yourself. Websites designed using frames can cause problems for search engine spiders.
- The best websites in terms of SEO, accessibility and design are created by designers who are able to write HTML, javascript, CSS and other code from scratch. When looking for a designer, it is worth asking how much knowledge they have of writing code and of SEO. Dreamweaver and Frontpage are two popular software programs, used for designing websites, which create the HTML code for you, but it does help if the designer has some knowledge of how to write the code themselves.
5. Write content that contains the keywords that you want search engines to index
- This may seem glaringly obvious, but the content of your website needs to contain the keywords that search engines can index. The keywords should be sprinkled throughout the text and don’t worry if the text seems repetitive. People read text on a web page differently to printed text. They scan looking for relevant information, rather than reading every word.
- Indexers prioritise headings so make your headings relevant to an index. For example, instead of saying “New stuff” you could say: “Recent oil paintings”.
- Gone are the days when you could just stuff your meta tags with keywords to boost your ratings. Search engines block sites that appear to be manipulating the rankings unfairly or are using keywords that are misleading. What are meta tags? Meta tags are located between the <HEAD> </HEAD> tags at the top of the HTML document you’ve generated. They are a snippet of informational code where you can add keywords that relate to the content of your website. In fact it is the description that is the most useful as this is what will appear in the listing. Make sure it has full sentences and says something informative about your site.
