Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation are both terms bandied
about all over the internet these days. There are hundreds of companies out
there offering to elevate your site to Google #1 for a sometimes sizeable fee.
Often these companies will employ dubious techniques to gain a fast shortterm
elevation in search engine rankings such a link farms or keyword stuffing. These
techniques are discussed later in this article but D2 Computing Ltd take the
ethical approach to optimisation and avoid any techniques along these lines and
recommend that you do too. Implementation of ‘tricks’ such as these can have
exactly the opposite affect and leave your site blacklisted by the major engines
further along the line.
Search engine algorithms are becoming more intelligent by the day meaning
quality content that people actually want to read will win in the end. This is
what we concentrate on at D2 Computing, creating quality content that will have
your potential clients returning time and time again rather than a site designed
to be read by a search robot.
Listed below are 10 tips to increase your search engine ranking. Many of them
may seem obvious but it’s amazing how often the obvious tips are overlooked and
not implemented!
Top 10 Tips to help with Search Engine Placement
1. Fresh, Regular, Good Quality Content
These tips are in no particular order, with the exception of this one! Forget all the
tips and tricks, content is everything.
Regular, frequent, good quality content updates are a must! This is often
overlooked, many people put a great deal of effort into writing the initial site
and then tend to lapse on the updates side of things.
Add an ‘articles’ or ‘latest news’ section to your site and regularly write or
encourage your staff to write short relevant pieces to be included. Once a month
is not enough! If you check any web server logs you will notice the frequency
that search engine spiders will hit a regularly updated site. Not monthly but
often several times a day. The search engine spider likes to find new content
when it visits and makes a note to check back soon to see if any more updates
are available.
If the search engines are visiting your site and notice the same old content
week after week, month after month whereas your competitors site is being
updated each day with a new relevant industry article you can guess who is going
to get preference in the search results!
Also when adding fresh content, check the new item is visible to the search
engine spiders. Place a link to it on one of your already indexed pages so the
spider will follow and find your updates.
2. Inbound relevant links
Search engines, as well as looking at your own sites content, will rank your
site according to how many other well ranked sites contain links pointing to
you. A large number of external links to your site from other trusted sites will
boost your ranking considerably.
Links should be relevant to your site content and come from a well regarded
source. This is where the practise of “link farms” comes into play and should be
avoided:
Link Farms: A link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to
every other page in the group. Most are created through automated programs and
services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine
(sometimes called spamdexing or spamexing). This is a technique often employed
by less scrupulous optimisation firms who create pages and pages of sites just
containing links to hundreds of unrelated sites. It is strongly recommended that
you avoid this practise.
How do I get good inbound links? Good sources of inbound links are forums and
blogs, find and participate in a forum relevant to your business. For example,
if you sell motorcycle products then join a few rider forums and get involved in
the community. Most forums allow you to create a signature for your postings so
add the URL to your site and a brief description of what you do. It is important
to provide good helpful responses to postings and not just create a post
entitled ‘Shop at Acme Bike Stuff’ blatantly plugging your site. This is seen as
spam by forum moderators and will get you banned.
Also talk to your customers and suppliers, it may be that they have their own
site and are willing to trade links, these sort of links are relevant and
therefore highly ranked, both parties will benefit from the arrangement.
3. Good Keyword Selection
Searches work on the basis of keywords, when a user searches they will often
just input a couple of words or short phrase as their search term. It is
important to guess correctly what a customer searching for your particular goods
or service will use as their search term.
This is where optimisation becomes more scientific – how can you guess what
users are searching on and what keywords are right for your particular sites
pages and how often should they appear?
When writing your website copy, first have a think about the most popular words
associated with your product or service that immediately spring to mind. Write
these down as a list.
Type these terms into a major engine such as Google, Yahoo etc and see what
comes up near the
top. View these top ranked pages to get a feel for why the
content of these particular sites is so successful. Look at the distribution of
the keyword you typed into the engine across the page. Also view the META tags
of the returned page (Right Click View Source in Internet Explorer). The META
tags will appear towards the top of the code within the tags. It may be useful
to view what list of keywords your competitors have chosen to include.
As an example, we are producing a motorcycle clothing store so we produce our
list of keywords that spring to mind: ‘Helmets, motorcycle gloves, motorcycle
leathers’ etc.
We put the term ‘Helmets’ into Google and view the top ranked page. We see that
the term ‘Helmets’ is liberally sprinkled throughout the page in a natural way,
not just long strings of text containing the keyword.
Keyword density is important; you want your chosen keywords to appear several
times throughout the article but not to appear as if you are spamming that
keyword or term. It should appear natural to a human reader.
There are optimum densities for keywords in your text copy and many tools
available to recommend what changes you need to make and where. Contact D2
Computing Ltd for more info on this.
Looking at the page source code we see the following META inclusion: <meta
content="motorcycle helmets, motorcycle clothing, motorcycle parts, motorcycle
accessories, helmets, clothing, parts, accessories" name="keywords" />
So we now have a few more keywords to add to our list!
We can now use a tool to determine how popular these search terms are and find
any popular variations on the keywords. Many tools exist to do this but in this
example we are going to use the Google Keyword Tool
(https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). We type helmets into
this to find out what the most popular search terms are based around this word.
This returns a large number of search terms used but we see that the top are:
Helmet, helmets, motorcycle helmets, arai helmets, bike helmet, shoei helmets.
So we now know what most people are using as their search so we want all these
terms in our helmet section. We will do the same for all other areas of the
site. Write at least 200-250 lines of relevant copy on your pages, each with a
sprinkling of the chosen keywords.
Quality is King! Remember; whilst keyword choice is important do not
compromise the readability and presentation of your site. Overuse of keywords
and adding keywords for the sake of it makes for a bad experience for your sites
users and may be seen as spam by search engines. Read all the copy you produce
from the point of view of a user.
4. Title & META tags
META tags in your pages can be valuable; they are not a magic solution to
placement but should by no means be ignored.
The two most common tags are ‘keywords’ and ‘description’. The ‘keywords’ tag
does not have the relevance it used to have in search engine placement but
should still be included. The ‘description’ tag is more important and should
include a good, keyword containing description of your page content. The
description tag is often displayed by search engines on their results pages so
should be worded wisely to tempt users to click onto your site rather than one
of the other results. Using the example from the previous step, the motorcycle
helmet section of our site could contain tags such as:
<meta name="keywords" content="motorcycle helmets, bike helmets, arai helmet,
shoei helmet, motorbike helmets" />
<meta name="description" content="Great deals on motorcycle helmets. Arai and
Shoei bike helmets in stock" />
An additional page attribute is the page title. This is also displayed in the
search engine results so should be altered for each page on your site to be
relevant to the content. For example our page title here should be something
like “Acme Bike Gear – Motorcycle Helmets”. All too often the page title is
ignored and just left as something like the company name across all pages.
5. Internal Linking
Make sure that search engine robots (and users!) can find all the content
you have worked hard to produce. A robot or spider will identify all the links
on a page and follow them unless instructed otherwise. Ensure that all your
content can be reached and there are no broken strands of the link web that
makes up your site. Use descriptive names for your links for example instead of:
Arai helmets, click <a href="Arai-helmets.htm">here</a>
Use:
<a href="Arai-helmets.htm">Click here for arai helmets</a>
i.e. The description of the product is contained within the link itself.
6. Header Tags
When laying out your site copy, use the correct HTML tags to define which parts
of your document are headers and titles. For example the HTML tag <h1> defines
the enclosed text as a top level header and search engine spiders will read the
text as such. So if you include the title: <h1>Motorcycle Helmets</h1> In your
copy then this is saying “the following text is about…” and any keywords within
the header may be given greater prominence than ‘ordinary’ text.
7. Sitemaps
Sitemaps are normally XML based documents which provide an ‘index’ of your site
to search engines similar to the index of a book. They tell the engines how the
link structure of your site works and points them towards any pages that may not
ordinarily be found by a search spider. You can even tell the engines how often
a page is likely to be updated so the spiders know to visit that area more
often. Sitemaps are supported by all the major search engines but view each
engines requirements as certain syntax may differ between engines. Sitemaps are
particularly useful if your site:
• Contains dynamically generated content such as online stores or database based
catalogues.
• Has a large number of pages that are not well linked to each other meaning a
spider may not find the pages by following links
A Sitemap is worthwhile as it reduces the risk of your pages not being indexed
due to ‘gaps’ in your content links. Many sites offer free tools to
automatically generate a Sitemap for your site.
8. Use Title and ALT attributes.
Your site images can (and should) contain an ALT tag. This is a piece of text in
the HTML code designed to be used in place of the image if it cannot be
displayed and ‘describe’ the image to search engines and the visually impaired.
Use this tag! Include a relevant descriptive piece of text such as “Arai RX-7
Corsair Helmet”. Your links can contain a title=”” tag and you should also use
this to tell search engines what to expect when following the link for example:
<a href="somepage.htm" title="buy Arai helmets online">Click here for arai
helmets</a></p>
9. Page File Naming
When creating new pages, choose a relevant name for the page file. Instead of
naming the pages ‘helmets1.htm’, ‘helmets2.htm’ etc, use names such as
‘Arai-Motorcycle-Helmets.htm’.
10. Study your Stats
Most good hosting packages should come with some form of online stats package
where a graphical analysis of your website log files can viewed. These stats can
be very useful in determining where your incoming links originate from, what
search keywords users are using to reach your site, what the most popular pages
on your site are and also show any 404 errors thrown by missing pages or broken
links. All website packages hosted by D2 Computing Ltd include a full statistics
package.
Summary
Optimising your site for search engines can be a time consuming and complex task
if you follow every single trick listed on various SEO sites. If you run through
the tips above you should hopefully see positive results and all are fairly
straightforward to implement.
The golden rule is to write your site with your target audience in mind first
and foremost – human readers, not search spiders.
Don’t let optimisation
compromise or affect the quality of your site.
If you require any further information on Search Engine Optimisation, the
please
contact D2.