Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the number one requirement when it comes to website marketing.

There are so many different things to help you optimise your website that it can sometimes be confusing. That's where we come in! Whether it's a website we are designing for you or you have a website out on the web already we can trawl through it and make the nesessary changes to it.

So what would we do to optimise your website?

1. Website Content

your website can hold an amazing amount of content about you business. We want to make sure it is holding the right information. We will liase with you and ask you questions on what services/products you offer/sell and can make adjustments to the text to inforce these areas of your business.

It is also important to write things in the correct way. E.g.

Old text: "I am not an engineer"

Replace with: "I am a computer aided designer"

This will mean that people searching for "computer aided designers" will hopefully end up on your site instead of people searching of "engineers".

It is also recommended to repeat important keywords a few times in main website content.

2. Using HTML Headings

It is important to put important keywords and titles into header tags (H1). This helps search engine quickly find key words by searching for header tags.

Header 1

Header 2

Header 3

Header 4

etc

3. Meta Tags & Meta Descriptions

Somethings that are easy to miss are the keywords and description tags. This are very useful as the text put into these tags are not shown on the page when viewed however are read by search engines.

This means that although the text will be similar to website content you, you can house certain additional text that won't quite fit into the main text usually as it would be out of context.

It is also a great place to repeat important keywords yet again.

4. Images and Hyperlinks

Alot of information can be held in the tags of images and links.When a search engine indexes your site it searches this information and can increases the chances of it showing you on the first page of a search result.

For instance you can give images titles and descriptions, which can be useful to hold keywords about the page it is on. this will help particularly with image searches which can lead directly to the page on which the image is shown.

This will also help people when looking at your site and using accessability services.

Naming images is also a useful area to focus on. The average site has many images used and therefore can be a daunting task to go through renaming them to suite their purpose. We can make the job much easier for you by altering the names and <img> tags for you. To all intense and purposes the website would look no different but search engines are much more likely to find the right page when searched for.

5. Correct Coding

As there are so many websites out thee ans for some people they have fierce competition, search engines need to decide what websites are best. They do this by trawling the code and marking down on poor coding.

For example:

<IMG SRC=MAIN_IMAGE.JPG>

Should be written as such:

<img src="main_image.jpg" />

Both examples above woul show the image "main_image.jpg" in most if not all browsers however searche engines would mark your website down for code similar to the first example. These subtle difference may mean the difference to being shown on a search or not.

We can help you check all your pages and test whether all the code is correct to avoid search engines marking you down.

6. Site Map

A site map can not only be useful for people but very useful for search engines as it is an easy way for them to know what links together and how big your site is. Some pages on your site may not link to others and this would limit a search engine to trawl your site properly however a site map could get around that.

We can create a site map for your website whether a simple html website or a complex CMS website.

7. Search Engine Friendly URLS (dynamic sites)

Most people dont notice the url of the page they are on however search engines use them to navigate the site and also link to. with dynamic pages such as php and asp pages, the page can alter significantly by changing variables in the url.

This can mean that search engines will not even touch some dynamic pages as the pages could be near infinite in number, therfore to get round this is to create urls that do not seem to hold variables.

For example:

services.php?id=5&title=Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

changes to

/Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)-5/

To a search engine the new url is a directory and therefore not likely to change meaning that the search engine will now index the page!

If yo are interested in optimising your Website please contact me