Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Basics
Written by Nick Dunn published 14th Mar 2006 | Comment on this article
A brief skip through the first things you should check when you first start to optimise your site.
Optimising your website for the search engines need not be a difficult task. If you have written some decent content, and use your HTML markup sensibly, then you've already done most of the hard work. In my view, there are three main parts of ?optimising? your pages.
1. Getting your pages into the search engines
This basically means that you need to have your web pages live on the Web where the search engines can see them. Two ways of getting your pages indexed/crawled by the engines are:
a) Using the specific submission tool for each engine (here's Google's)
b) Have other sites link to yours, so your site is picked up naturally by the search engine spiders
2. Optimising your pages for efficient performance
Your links need to be crawlable by search engine spiders (don't hide links in JavaScript or Flash), and your HTML markup should be as clean as possible. However just being in the search engine index won't generate high traffic. You need to optimise your content for specific keywords. I'm not going to go into keyword optimisation here, since it's a very broad topic covered well elsewhere:
Once you've chosen your keywords, you need to consider keyword placement on your page. Generally speaking, you should aim to get your keywords appearing as near to the top of your page as you can. This means they should appear in your <title> tag, your <meta> keywords tag, and your page content. The following list is a selection of well-documented tips for optimising for specific keywords.
a) Using the <title> tag
If your site content is created from a content management system or e-commerce package, you may find that every page in your site has the same Title. You're wasting valuable real estate. Ideally your chosen keywords should be as close to the beginning of the title as possible. It's fine to include things like your company name in the title, but look at the following example and decide which is the more appropriate.
Nick & Son's Art Gallery
Rare Illustrations, Paintings and Prints from Nick & Son's Art Gallery, London
b) <meta> tags
Meta tags are rarely used by the major search engines now. They do not need to rely on these tags to describe your page content. However it is still good practice to include these, since there are bound to be indexing systems looking at your pages that *do* like to munch on meta tag content.
c) Heading tags
Heading tags are your friend, and as such they are not to be abused! Putting keywords in your heading tags gives them more prominence on a page, but use them wisely. The practice of keyword stuffing can reap penalties and banning from the search engine Gods. As Mike Pepper points out ("Site and Page Structure"), your heading tags should reflect the organic structure of content on your document.
d) Efficient linking techniques
Search engines can only index your pages if there are links to the pages themselves. Text links (hyperlinks) are arguably the best. However, the simple link can be a powerful SEO tool, for the actual clickable text of a link can have a bearing on the relevant of a web page. The concept is simple. Search engines (Google for one) find all of the links to a web page, and evaluate the clickable hyperlink text of each of these links. If there is a consistent keyword featuring in the links, then it will push this page higher up the results for that keyword. Conclusive evidence of this concept comes in the form of the practice known as Google Bombing. As such, when forging links from other websites to your own, you should try and get your keywords included in the links too.
3. Patience, monitoring and updating
Making changes to your pages will not have an immediate impact on your site's performance. It can take weeks, even months, for the fruits of your labour to ripen and spread through all of the search engines. Thus it is vital that you monitor your site traffic; where people come from, what links are they clicking on, what they're looking for; and update your site accordingly.
Search engines are constantly evolving and changing the way they rank our sites. Working your way to the top for a specific keyword isn't difficult, but one change in the search engine algorithm, and you can be knocked off the top spot without warning. It's a good idea to keep tabs on industry sites and resources/articles for the latest updates.
Useful further reading