SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
TOP TIPS
1. Choosing a simple URL, free of excessive punctuation symbols, is a simple but effective step in a good search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. The spiders that search engines use to locate pages won’t index pages with a URL that uses symbols excessively. Dynamic URLs will be indexed by some search engines but not by others. In terms of search engine optimisation, these pages will be penalised by search engines that use link analysis to improve relevance ranking, as they are difficult to link to, and pages are indexed based on the number of other pages that link to them.
2. For good search engine optimisation, the pages of your website should contain several instances of certain keywords and key terms that people are likely to type into a search engine when looking for a site like yours. In terms of search engine optimisation, the more often a keyword appears, the more relevant a search engine will judge the site to be, and the higher it will appear when indexed. However, in the process of search engine optimisation, it is also important to avoid over-using keywords, to the point of having content which makes no sense.
3. In an attempt at search engine optimisation, some websites hide keywords, repeated hundreds of times in the background, by setting the text colour to match background colour. Search engines used to be fooled by this search engine optimisation technique to improve search engine ranking, but websites are now penalised for this, so hiding keywords should be avoided as part of a good search engine optimisation strategy.
4. A technique called cloaking involves sending different web pages to users, depending on the circumstances. This is highly inadvisable from a search engine optimisation standpoint. For example, a page which has been optimised during the search engine optimisation process for a particular keyword may be indexed by a search engine, but when a user attempts to visit the page, having searched that keyword, they may receive a totally different page in an attempt to redirect them. Websites that contain cloaked pages may be permanently banned from search engines.
5. For the purposes of search engine optimisation, it is useful to always make sure you have enough content on your website to cover all the keywords that users might search for your website under. To ensure good search engine optimisation, if you frequently add new content, ensure it contains several sentences of keyword-rich text.
6. Using descriptive HTML on all the pages of your website (including meta tags) is another simple but effective search engine optimisation technique; it will increase the appeal of your page when seen in search engine results. This aspect of search engine optimisation will encourage users to visit your site from the search page.
7. When a user visits your site from a search engine, they don’t necessarily arrive at your home page. It is a good search engine optimisation technique for your web page to use an appealing design, consistent on every page, so no matter which page users arrive at, they are encouraged to explore the other pages on your site. With search engine optimisation, equal consideration should go into the design of each page so that they will be indexed effectively by search engines.
8. In terms of search engine optimisation it is better to stick to the big names (e.g. Google, Yahoo) than to attempt to reach hundreds of search engines. While the latter approach may be effective in getting your site advertised in every corner of the web, the big name search engines have more advanced software designed to crawl the web. Utilising this software is important in successful search engine optimisation. Names like google and Yahoo are well known for a reason, finding and indexing web pages are what they are built to do, and it’s what they do well.
9. Keywords towards the top of a page are considered more important, in search engine optimisation, than keywords towards the bottom of a page. With this in mind, pages should be written so that keywords appear as early as possibly.
10. It is important in search engine optimisation, to select the appropriate keywords for your webpage. To achieve this, it helps to communicate with your intended users, through blogs, forums etc. It may also be useful to talk to departments within your organisation that are specialised in dealing with customers. Selecting the right keywords is vital to a good search engine optimisation strategy.
11. Including a site map in your website is useful for search engine optimisation; it is recommended by search engines as it will speed up the indexing process. It is also important for search engine optimisation for all of the key pages in your site to include a link to the home page, increasing ease of navigation by reducing the number of clicks a user has to make to get to the page they want. A correctly constructed website can improve indexability, another benefit for search engine optimisation.
12. It may be useful to have people visiting your site generating pay-per-click funds, but in terms of search engine optimisation, if you're trying to sell products online, you want the people visiting your site to be potential buyers; otherwise they'll just use up your bandwidth.
13. A good search engine optimisation strategy should include getting your site listed on internet directories. A good listing can increase the popularity of your site, generating a lot of new traffic, and in search engine optimisation terms it will increase your search engine ranking. To get indexed in a directory, you will have to submit a description of you site to a particular category. Directories are more specific that search engines, so it can be more difficult to get your site listed in a directory than in a search engine.
14. With search engine optimisation, it is easy to overlook simple changes you can make when tweaking your HTML to make it search friendly. It is a common search engine optimisation mistake to not place keywords within the title tags. The title tags should contain the keywords you wish to be searched under. It is a good idea, as part of a good search engine optimisation strategy, for individual pages to have title tags that contain keywords which are relevant to that page.
15. JavaScript and CSS should be kept in external files, and not embedded into the HTML code. Subsequently, search engines won't be processing documents with content they'll ignore, which will not benefit you in terms of search engine optimisation. You'll also save on bandwidth and data-transfer. For the benefit of search engines that don't have images enabled, your pictures should have a small amount of alternative text; one fairly short sentence should suffice.
16. Search engines are put off by poor colour design on your web page. It goes without saying, but for the benefit of search engine optimisation, and of course your users, you shouldn't use text which is the same colour as your background. This technique can be used to hide keywords, but it just serves to confuse search engines, so it's isn't good search engine optimisation.
17. In terms of search engine optimisation, it is best to stick to good quality HTML to make you webpage "crawler friendly". Flash and JavaScript is generally not interpreted by search engines. Crawlers will get confused by menus written in Flash and this will affect ranking. Your popularity with users will decrease if your site isn't easily usable and accessible, as a result of poorly written code.
18. Many site owners use sneaky spamming techniques in an attempt to artificially increase their link popularity. These techniques shouldn’t be used as part of a positive search engine optimisation strategy. Search engines are becoming increasingly aware of such techniques, and penalise sites these site heavily, maybe evening banning them completely, despite a possible boost in rankings initially. It is therefore better to stick to more honest search engine optimisation techniques. This mostly happens to people to spam intentionally, but there are some site owners who spam accidentally. Checking the guidelines for site owners can help you avoid this trap.
19. Search engines want to present the best websites, more accurately and efficiently than their competitors. For this reason, linking strategies are a core aspect of web space today, and a core part of search engine optimisation. A linking strategy is effectively just name-dropping on the web, which is something that search engines detect with index rankings. So it's important to your search engine optimisation strategy, to get you site referenced on many credible sites across the web. Credible linking strategies will help to close the gap between you and the higher ranked sites.
20. Add something simple like a Flash game or funny video. As a simple but effective search engine optimisation technique, having some unique on your site that people will want to link to will create a buzz on forums and other communities on the web. If your site is new than this search engine optimisation technique is particularly important. In terms of search engine optimisation, these links are seen as endorsements by search engines and will lead to better ranking.
|
Kudos Web Design