SEO Basics
Alot of my clients have asked me what is search engine optimisation, and why do i need it? Search engine optimisation is the process of submitting your website to search engines, as well as optimising your website (and its content) to be parsed (read) by search engines.
Its all about getting your website listed on search engines and targeting keywords and phrases to help people find your site. Ideally you want to get your website to top of a search results page. Hopefully this post will help you to achieve this.
This guide will take you through four basic steps. Some knowledge of HTML is assumed, however if you do not know any HTML I highly recommend you buy ‘html, xhtml, and css‘ by Elizabeth Castro. The book assumes no prior knowledge of web design or programming. It gives example snippets of code, explains the code line by line, and also shows the output of the code. I give each of my clients a copy of this book. It is a must have.
Step I: Optimise your site
When “reading” your site, search engines want to put in as little effort as possible. The quicker they can read your site the happier they will be. To allow your websites to be read quickly it is helpful to make your website conform to standards. An organisation called the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has introduced standards for HTML, XHTML and various other markup languages. If your site conforms to these standards, it is more likely to be read quicker. To check if you website conforms to these standards you can check your website by insertinig the websites address of your site here.
Also if you can use text, rather than images do so! Search engines can not read text in images! There are tricks whereby you display an image to users, and display text to search engines. This is a more advance topic, and wont be covered here.
Tables are for data only! If you designing sites using tables stop! Tables are meant for tabular data only. If you do not understand what i mean it is worth reading this article.
Get to the content! A search engine does not want to have to traverse 40% of the markup before it gets to the content. If you can minimise the amount of markup on the site do it.
Meta tags, and title tags; you should be filling these in religiously. There are many meta tags you can use, but you should definitely be filling in the description meta tag, this is what people will see in the search engine results page. Personally i find the description tag, and the title tag weight very heavily when targeting keywords and phrases. Personally I find the keywords meta tag is redundant. If you can provide unique description tags and title tags for each page, this can really help when users are searching for your site. I would recommend something along the lines of “Your Company Name : Page Name”, where Your ‘Company Name’ is your companies name and ‘Page Name’ describes the page, e.g. Home / Contact Us etc.. If your business is geographically conscious (e.g. you want to target somewhere close to home) then i highly recommend putting the business location in your title tag ( e.g. “Your Company Name, City : Page Name”).
Step II: Optimise your content
Optimising content is different from site optimisation. Site optimisation is more about the template of your site. Optimising your content is more about copyright, and the structure of your content.
You should think about your content as a document. It has a single heading, paragraphs of text, sub headings, and sub sub headings. H tags (eg. H1, H2, H3 etc..) should be used appropriately H1 being the documents heading, H2 a sub headings and H3 a sub sub headings. Please put paragraphs in P tags. There are standards and you should be conforming to them.
When writing your content you want to be dropping in keywords, or words which may be associated with the topic that you are writing about.
You may be targeting a certain phrase, be aware potential readers may call it something else. For example “stand up paddle surfing” is the same as “stand up paddle boarding”. If i forget to mention stand up paddle boading, when writing about stand up paddle surfing. Search engines wont pick up on it. Expand your use of language, different people search for different things, but can be looking for exactly the same thing.
Write your keywords as you say them. I have several clients who’s business names are two words without a space between them. However looking at what people search for, they are searching for a mix of two words joined together (e.g. “jhlabs”), and the two words with the space(e.g. “jh labs”). So mix it up a bit.
Step III: Submiting your Site
Heres a secret most companies wont tell you. You yourself can submit your site to seach engines! There are two ways of doing this. FIrst if your website gets linked to by another site that is already listed, it will most probably be automatically submitted.
However the more reliant way is to directly add your site to search enginges. To do this you can use their search enginge submission tools for Free. Normally all you have to do is fill in a form with your website address, and brief description of your site (no more than 50 words).
- Submit your site to Google
- Submit your site to Yahoo! (requires you to register with a Yahoo account)
- Submit your site to Microsoft Live / MSN Search
If you want to submit to any other search engines just search for the search engines name and submission. E.g. “Google Submission”. I do not recommend tools which state they submit your site to X number of search engines. Also these companies can not guarantee that you will be listed, there is a very very high probability that you will be listed. But search engines can refuse to list you.
Step IV: Promoting your Site & Keeping it fresh
Once your site has been submitted, the worst thing you can do is let it stagnate. No one wants to re-visit a site with no fresh content on it. Also no one likes a site with incorrect details on it.
Content is king! The more quality content you have the better. Ideally you want to become an authority site on your desired product/market/niche. To become an authority site you need to be known, and talked about. If you can get other sites to link to your site it can help its “authority ranking”. However I recommend that if you do purse this route, make sure they are either geographically linked, or have a common interest. There is no point you being a online clothes shop in Swansea, and linking sharing with a fishmongers in London.
Have a blog! By keeping a blog you are informing the world of what is happening with your site and your business. The advantage of blogs is everything is time stamped. So a search engine will be able to recognise if content is fresh. I highly recommend downloading and using wordpress as a blog system, or expression engine. Blogs are great for targeting keywords and phrases, and can really help SEO wise. Just please remember never to stop blogging.
This tutorial barely scratches the surface of SEO techniques, and is intended to be a beginners/introduction guide. In the coming months i shall be writing about more in-depth and advance SEO techniques. I hope this tutorial has helped you. If you have any questions and/or comments please feel free to ask/comment. I will try to respond as soon as possible.
Tags: Blogging, Content Optimisation, Copyrighting, Google, Live, MSN, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Submission, SEM, Submission, Tutorials, Yahoo