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Getting your website noticed by the search engines is very easy. All you really need to do is make sure that at lease one other website, anywhere, has a link to yours. That’s it. Sooner or later your site will be discovered and recorded in the archives. Unfortunately, that’s not enough. Without a comprehensive strategy for web optimisation, your site will be listed so far down the list it will be lost in obscurity amongst the millions of web sites fighting for attention.

The basic idea with page optimisation is to make your site easy for the search engine “spiders” to understand. The index created by these search engine “bots” will be used to ascertain the relevance of your site in terms of the search terms requested by their users.

The following points give a brief overview of good search engine strategies that will help to improve your search engine result position.

Your domain name

It may be too late to make any changes here, but if you are haven’t chosen a domain name for your site yet then the following should be considered.

• Choose a domain name that is not too long or difficult to remember.
• It should relate to the topic or content of your web site.
• Preferably the domain name should contain keywords that a “spiders” will understand.
• Avoid abbreviations, dashes, underscores, numerals and other meaningless characters.
• Go for a .com (as opposed to .net, .org) name if possible, for no other reason than it is what customers will think of first.

Page titles should contain keywords

This does not refer to the title on the page itself but the words in the tile of the browser window itself, above all the navigation buttons. This is the text the will show as the link in the search engine results and is often considered as the most important trigger to get people to click on the link.

• The titles for all of your pages should contain keywords.
• Write titles that have relevant text at the beginning of the sentence. Tiles like “Welcome to my fantastic website about my hobby, train spotting” will not work as well as “Train spotting – my hobby”.
• The titles for your pages should preferably be less than 50 characters. This enables you to select a title that is precise, and one that will not be truncated in search results for reason of length.
• Searchers are always in a hurry. To get their attention try and write page titles that include your call to action.

META information

Every page on your site should include META information. There are many different META tags but the two most relevant for this article are “Key Words” and “Description”

• Keywords are the short phrases or individual words that you believe searchers will use when they are searching for your product or service.
• The description is a paragraph summarising the content of the page. It is often displayed in the search engines results to describe what page site is about.

Try and put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Think about how they will go about searching for information, and choose appropriate terms that will bring traffic to your site.

Quality of content

It is important to provide good quality content on your web site. The content should always be keyword-rich, as this helps the search engines to classify of your pages. This is one strategy for search engine optimisation that should be given heavy consideration. Content should therefore be well written, easy to understand and unique avoid repeating the same information and never use content from other web sites.

Images

It is important to understand that search engine spiders cannot read images, so remember to use the alternate meta tags for images.

• Try to put your keywords in the image tags
• Use descriptive captions for your images and again, try to use your keywords.

Inbound Links

Your rankings will be significantly improved by getting incoming links from other websites. Try to get inbound links from sites with higher ranking and use the same META tags as you, these will push up the ranking of your site. They will greatly benefit your site. Spend some time searching the Internet for sites that can achieve this request them to link back to your site.

• Everything on your site must be properly linked
• All links must be functioning, this will enable all of your content to be indexed.

Site registration

Once it is sufficiently optimised, make sure you register your site with all the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org). Each search engine has different registration requirements, so it is important to follow instructions closely.

Behave

Avoid using “Black Hat” techniques and spamming strategies such as irrelevant metadata and hidden text. It can be tempting but if your site gets banned from one or more search engine it will take a lot to get back. Avoid strategies that offer the easy way out for getting good ranking, remember if it sounds too good to be true it most certainly is.

Be patient.

Search Engine optimisation is not an over night solution. In most cases it will take many months to start seeing results.  The effort spent on search engine optimisation for your web site will be rewarded. By creating properly structured a web site with relevant interesting content you will give a richer experience for the reader, more web masters will be inclined to link to you, the search engines will take more notice and the whole thing will snowball and build momentum.

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