Search Engine Optimisation - tips and tricks ...
Getting a great google ranking is worth its weight in gold, especially if you are targeting a certain search phrase that would generate a lot of business for you. Search engine pay per click schemes can cost a fortune, the last time we checked the phrase "web design" cost in excess of £6 / $12 to get a number 1 ranking pay per click link on google. Not a sport for the feint hearted, or those with small advertising budgets. Good SEO seems to be the holy grail of the internet, so we are going to share with you a few pointers to help you get on the right road, as after all, the success of our customers is of utmost importance to us - so it is important for us to research this type of information. If our customers are shining and thriving then so are we!
First things first ...
Its definitely worth submitting your site to google, so it can start crawling your site sooner rather than later. There is another search engine called dmoz, which is a search engine that contains links that people input into it themselves, rather than a program running around the internet looking for web sites to add, this means each submission is hand picked and entered into the appropriate category, its definitely worth having an entry on there. Once your site has been listed by google and dmoz the other major search engines will pick upon it sooner or later, usually within a few months. If you need some help listing your site on these search engines, get in touch and we can help!
Keywords and meta what?
Keywords and meta descriptions are important, these are little snippets of code that are hidden in the header of your web page. Search engines look for these and read them. With the clickcreations web design tool you are able to add and edit keywords and meta tags on each of your pages. Its also important to have meaningful page titles. With our system again, you have control over this, each page title contains the site title and the page name. It also helps if you have your star key phrase within your website address, but this is not essential, its just another way for search engines to validate the site they are returning in a search. There is a great video from google explaining all about this here ...
Content is king!
Your websites content is the key to the kingdom! First off make sure you site has a meaningful title – this is one of the first places a search engine looks for info – so make sure its got all the best keywords inside it. Think about the ideal search phrases you'd like to have associated with your web site - for example - we want "web design" to be the main search phrase associated with clickcreations - so we have written a text which has many instances of web design on our home page - its also included in our site title - and we have used it in our keywords and meta descriptions. When it comes to the content of your website though its quite important not to use the phrase or keyword more than 12% - it seems successful web sites use their main keyword around 4 or 7% - they also generally seem to have one of the pages on their website named after the keyword or search phrase - eg we now have a link called "web design" on our website. To research the best keywords to use on your website you can use something like this – this site shows you how many times certain keywords or phrases have been searched for on all the big search engines and it suggests and shows others that are similar. To get more details they ask for payment but there are other sites out there that do a similar thing so it’s worth shopping around.Its worth noting that google keeps a cached page of your website that gets updated around once a month - this is the index it uses when performing a search, so if you make a change to your website remember it will take a while for it to register. If you'd like to see what google has cached for your website then go to google and type in cache:http://www.yourwebsitehere.com and it will show you the page it has stored. There is a really good website that has a great tool on it you can use to optimize your site - it will analise your web pages content and give you a keyword density cloud - which gives you a good idea what search engines will see when they analyze your site: http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php this site is worth poking around on to learn about SEO.
Inbound or outbound links?
Google assigns a page rank to your web site and content, this gives an indication of the quality of the site. The way to a good page rank is getting other web pages with good page ranks to link to you. These are called inbound links. It is best to get an inbound link from a website that has a page rank of 4 or above, so try to go for high quality! Outbound links are links you have going from your website to other websites, these can affect your page rank if they are linking to sites which are blacklisted or suspect, ie x rated or scam websites. So be careful where you link to from your site.
Another thing you can do is promote your website on social networking sites like facebook, ecademy, myspace, stumbleupon and BT Tradespace, all of these sites allow you to put links back to your own website therefor providing good quality inbound links.
Last but not least ...
Experiment - try different things and combinations, google tends to like websites that have content added and refreshed. Also the longer your site has been in existence the higher the rating it will get as this is another thing that google has been using to validate pages and search terms. So if you have a new website – make sure you do all of the above and be patient … one day it will all pay off!Hopefully this has provided you with a taste of the art of Search Engine Optimization, it can become quite an absorbing hobby getting your website just right, have fun!
