With all the hype surrounding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) you would be forgiven thinking that you need a degree in computer science to optimise your website for the entire gamut of search engines. Fortunately this is note the case! As long you follow some simple rules you too can come up number one on Google.
Do I need an SEO company?
At my day job many clients ask if they should use a Search Engine Optimisation company. I always suggest to be very careful with SEO companies especially if the company is offering ‘guaranteed number one position’ or ’submission to 1000 website directories’. What I always suggest to do first is to write meaningful and unique content for your website and then do some basic search engine optimisation yourself. By using valid and semantically meaningful HTML code with good content you will be well on your way to achieving a good search engine ranking.
Content
It is often said that content rules the web and this is so very true. You can have a perfectly optimised and professionally built website, but if you don’t have content there is nothing for a search engine robot to index. Writing good and relevant content is the most important part of any search engine optimisation strategy. When writing the content for you website try to think what would someone actually type into a search engine to find what you are writing about. Once you have worked out these keywords or keyword phrases you need to try and mention them as often as possible, consequently making your content more relevant to those terms. Updating your website with good keyword dense content regularly will do two things to help your site:
- It will encourage people to come back to your website because they will want to see the next installment of your content and;
- it will make search engine robots revisit your website more often enabling your content to get indexed quicker.
Page titles
Following on from writing good keyword dense content I believe is the second most import part of search engine optimisation - writing good page titles. Much the same can be said about writing page titles as about writing content; it must be both relevant and keyword dense. One basic mistake often made is to have the same page title for each website page, this makes it extremely hard for both users and search engine robots to distinguish between each of your website pages. It is especially important to write good page titles as they are displayed prominently in search engine results. Because of this a website page title must be relevant while also enticing the user to action your website by clicking on your link.
Semantic HTML
Building your site with semantic and meaningful HTML is essential. Using clean and lightweight HTML code will reduce your content to markup ratio, while also structuring your code in a meaningful way for the search engine robots. Start building your website by thinking about the content and how it should be presented without styles. For example, use h1 to h6 elements to mark up headings and ul’s to markup list elements. Then use progressive enhancement of CSS, JavaScript or Flash to add style and functionality to your website leaving your HTML code as it was intended.
SEO friendly URLs
Many search engines find it hard to follow links where the URL has an appended query strings on the end. Google says that it follows up to two Get variables, however, it is much better to avoid them whenever possible. A solution to this is to use Apache’s mod_rewrite functionality to enable you to add keywords into the URL while also providing indexable links.
Inbound links
A comprehensive link building strategy is essential to a search engine optimisation, often however, this proves to be the hardest part of the process. One good place to start to find inbound links to your website are directories such as Dmoz and Yahoo!. Directories provide topical text links to your website which are seen as a vote to the importances of your website.
What to avoid
There are some arcane web development techniques that should be avioded to help maintain your search engine ranking. Some of the horrible old web development techniques include:
- Frames - Frames provide problems when someone follows a search engine link to a famed page without the parent HTML page be present. This can be confusing and frustrating because parts of the website are missing.
- Flash - Because search engine robots find it hard to read Flash files when they are used for an entire website none of the content will get indexed. This problem can be fixed with progressive enhancement see: SEO friendly Flash programming for more information.
- JavaScript inserted navigation and links - Search engine robots do not read JavaScript, therefore, they will not be able to follow the inserted navigation and links.
- Font tags - meaningless tags that should be replaced with semantic elements such as h2 and strong
By avoiding some of the old web development techniques your website will be in good stead to be fully indexed and placed high on search engine results.
Conclusion
While everything I have mentioned in this article is neither new or groundbreaking for any SEO consultant or good web developer, it is an easy way to save money on a search engine optimisation company while increasing your websites search engine visibility and search engine ranking. One word of caution however, this is not an instant process, it takes months, even years to get the right mix of content, HTML structure and inbound links.
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