Search Engine Optimisation - SEO Explained
There are countless people offering Search Engine Optimisation many at great cost. Not all are good value for money. Once you have found a web designer you can trust it is likely he will know one or two people who are not only very good at SEO but who you make realistic charges and, most importantly, not do your business any harm. Yes it is possible by using innappropriate SEO techniques to get your website penalised or even blocked by the search engines. It is particularly not to link to ‘link-farms’ or other search engine unfriendly areas. As in all things in life, seek out an expert you can trust.
Search Engine Optimisation is a speciality in its own right but many website designers will build in features which enhance your site’s performance as standard. SEO specialists work with your designer to maximise the site’s performance in the search engine rankings. This is often an ongoing process and you should be prepared to engage an SEO specialist over a period of time.
Here are some basic ideas to give you a basic understanding of how to create accessible web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines. By ‘most popular’ most people will mean Google and Yahoo.
One word of definition - and that word is ‘keywords’. This is the hub of SEO. Keywords are a number of words that encapsulate your business. These are words that you might put into Google to fine a website like yours. Take time and trouble thinking of them, brainstorm colleagues, friends and family, and remember different people search in different ways. A husband may search differently to his wife, and differently again from his son or daughter. Ensure your keywords include words and phrases that all groups of people might use when searching for your site.
Make sure the title tag contains keywords so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing traffic to your site. The title tag like all expressions on your website must read as good English. We are writing the pages for people although we do want to attract robots!
Below the <head> tags are the Meta Tags, description and content. The content is a list of your keywords separated by commas, the description is the same but instead of a list you must expand them into phrases and sentences or legible English.
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords, here" />
<meta name="description" content="Keywords appear here" />
Don’t stuff the meta tags with meaningless keywords. As stated above, spend time choosing an effective selection of keywords and use and stick with these.
The title tag is the headline of the page, the same words should be used as the visible title of the web page and ne wrapped in an <h1> tag. This should be the only <h1> tag on the page.
Other headings on the page should be <h2>. Keywords should be used as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better. All keywords linking to other pages or back should be wrapped in <h2> tags.
The title tag text must be mirrored in the body text content of the page. It is not good to have keywords in the title tag which are not reflected in the body of the page. Your body text must be rich in keywords reflecting title, heading and meta text. Robots like this relation between the title of your page, the meta text, the headline and page content. The most important keywords can be embolded or coloured if you wish.
It is best not use the same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots will think your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.
Use the expression <head>web title same throughout - current page title</head>
Use keyword rich ‘alt tags’ with images and in titles of hyperlinks.
<img src="image.jpg" alt="Keywords here describing image" width="180" height="60" border="0" />
Remember at all times you are designing the pages for people. Google is getting very good at ranking people friendly pages over purely robot friendly pages.
When making navigation menus it is far better to use text links not images. If you want to use button images use background images. When you see nice navigation on a website view the source of this page to see how effects have been achieved.
If you are going to submit your website to a search engine it is best to do it yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned. Submit one page only once, there is no need to submit repeatedly or to submit multiple pages. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.
Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
A sitemap is a page which lists all the pages in your site with links to them. If you have a small site you can make it yourself for larger sites use a sitemap generator such as http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
You should submit your sitemap to Google through webmaster tools http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
404 Page not found! This is one page that will take peopleaway from your site never to return! Sure, they may have mistyped but it could be they have bookmarked a page you have since replaced. It is best to have a custom 404 page. Make One using your normal page content, titles navigation menus everything, with “404 Page not found - use the navigation or click here for the home page” in te text area, obviously with a link to your site index under ‘click here’. Call it ‘not-found.html’. I will tell you how to make this work in a moment. Hand in hand with this is clearly defining your site index. Google likes one url for a website http://www.graphicz.co.uk. It doesn’t like a selection such as http://graphicz.co.uk and http://www.graphicz.co.uk./index.html . The way to deal with this is firstly to use this as your home page link in menus <a href=”/”>Home</a> Secondly, if your website is on a Linux server to use an .htaccess file (The full stop at the beginning is important, there is no file extension.)
Here is an example .htaccess file that will direct all ‘index’ urls to the correct website url as well as directing all ‘page not found’ to the custom page 404 you made earlier. Copy and paste into notepad and ‘save as’ ‘.htaccess’ files of type ‘all files’. Upload to the root of your server. (Linux servers only!)
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{http_host} !^www.your-website-name.com$ [nc]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-website-name.com/$1 [r=301,nc,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.your-website-name.com/ [R=301,L]
ErrorDocument 401 http://www.your-website-name.com/not-found.html
ErrorDocument 400 http://www.your-website-name.com/not-found.html
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.your-website-name.com/not-found.html
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.your-website-name.com/not-found.html
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.your-website-name.com/not-found.html
More help is available from
Googles webmasters page is packed with good stuff: http://www.google.com/webmasters/.
