Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation is a term used to describe the process of making changes to a website in order to improve its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine.
There is a lot of information, good and bad, available on the web about how to optimise your website for the search engines. This article seeks to cut through the jargon and give you some simple guidelines on how to start optimising your website.
1. Research your online market
There is no point getting top position on Google for a phrase that nobody is searching for. The first thing you need to do is to find out which phrases web users are actually using to search for your products or services.
There are a number of websites which enable you to do this:
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
http://www.nichebot.com/
http://www.wordtracker.com/ (subscription based site, the most comprehensive tool available)
Once you know the phrases that people are searching for, check on how competitive they are. If you type each phrase into the major search engines and over 1,000,000 sites come back, you have very little chance of success! The fewer competitors, the easier your job will be.
The phrases you choose also need to fit naturally into your website – there’s no point attracting people into your website only to turn them off again with the poor quality of your copy.
2. Get the structure of your site right
If your web developer has not built your website to be ‘search engine friendly’, you may never have a hope of obtaining good search engine results without using pay per click advertising.
It’s best to make sure your site is structured right in the first place, so when commissioning a new site, try to avoid:
• Frames – where one part of the page stays static while the rest scrolls
• Splash pages – a page on the front of the site which says ‘click here to enter the site’
• Sites built mainly or entirely in Flash
• Javascript menu bars – these can make it difficult for search engines to find all of the pages on your site
• Long query strings – when the addresses of your page are very long and contain lots of funny characters such as question marks
If you’re not sure whether your site is affected by any of these, ask your web developer or ask WiRE member Ascendancy Internet Marketing to check your site for you.
3. Work the phrases you chose in step 1 into your site.
Choose up to two or three phrases to focus on per page – otherwise it will sound too repetitive. Repeat the phrases a few times without making the text sound awkward to the reader. It’s particularly important to put your target phrases into the ‘title tag’ – the title which appears on the blue bar at the top of your browser. This phrase should preferably be different for each page, so make sure that your site allows you to do this.
You may have heard that it is important to put a list of your keywords into the ‘meta tags’ on your site. Don’t worry too much about this. There are two types of ‘meta tags’ – meta keywords and meta description. There is some value in including your keywords in the meta description, but very few search engines take any notice at all of the meta keywords. It doesn’t do any harm at all to put your keywords in there, but if your site does not allow you to do this, don’t worry about it too much.
4. Get quality links from relevant websites
By getting a number of quality websites to link to you, you are demonstrating to the search engines that other site owners think that yours is a quality site – and if you can demonstrate this, you should see a boost in your search engine results.
You can start this process by making sure that, as a WiRE member, you have entered your details into the Rural Marketplace – this should give you one quality link to get you going!
Other ways of building links to your site include:
• Offering testimonials to suppliers who have provided you with good service – they may well be persuaded to include these on their site along with a link to your website.
• Submitting your site to online directories – the most important are the Open Directory http://www.dmoz.org/ and Yahoo Directory http://uk.dir.yahoo.com/. These are free to submit to, but it can take months or even years before they list you (if they ever do), so it’s best to submit to them as soon as you can.
• Checking out who is linking to your competitors and asking them to link to you too. You can check this by typing your competitor’s web address into Google and then clicking on ‘Find web pages that contain the term…”
• There are many article directories on the web which will accept articles on many different topics. Consider writing articles on subjects that you are knowledgeable about and submitting them to such sites.
• Submit press releases which mention your web address to online press release distribution services.
• There are many more ways of doing this but this should be enough to get you started!
5. Other factors involved
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There are numerous other factors which search engines take into account, some of which you have no control over – such as the age of your site. If your site has only just been launched, you may find that it takes time to get ranked well for any competitive search phrases – particularly in Google, where this can take at least six to nine months. You may find that you need to use pay per click advertising when your site is first launched in order to get traffic to your site quickly.
To sum up…
The three main factors to think about are content, structure and links. Getting all of this right is extremely time consuming, so don’t expect instant results. Don’t forget that, at the end of the day, your site needs to sell your products and services as well as attract traffic, so don’t go too far overboard with your optimisation and put your potential customers off!
This article was kindly provided by WiRE member Helen Mitchell of Ascendancy Internet Marketing. If optimising your own site seems far too daunting, contact Ascendancy on:
01952 676809
helen@ascendancyinternetmarketing.com
www.ascendancyinternetmarketing.com
The process of making changes to a website in order to improve its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine.
© 2012