Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

There are three major search engines - Google, Bing and Yahoo!, the majority of web users will use these to find a website relevant to their needs. If your site doesn't rank well in these search or even worse if your website doesn't even appear. You are missing out on amazing chances of business and increased traffic which is almost guaranteed to come with high rankings in search engines. No matter what sort of service or product your business provides, search engines are the key way for users to find your website, thus helping increase quality traffic to your website and making it more easily accessible to anyone who uses the web.

Search engines are constantly looking for ways to improve the quality and relevance of the results returned when a user enters a search term. Even though the search are reguraly being update, there is and will always be a limit as to how they can operate. Making the right move in optimising your website can boost your website up the rankings and massively increasing the traffic to your website. Making the wrong move can hide your website deep in the search engine results thus receiving minimal traffic. The online environment is becoming increasingly competitive, and those companies who perform SEO will have a decided advantage in visitors and customers.

There are many different elements to SEO, however they can be seperated into two separate areas - Onsite Optimization and Offsite Optimization. Both these areas are important in optimizing your website and you should spend equal time working on each area.

Basically Onsite Optimization consists of the optimization of anything on your actual site, for example - Title Tags, Meta Tags, the actual build of your site, content and so on, I will explain in more detail below. Offsite Optimization consists mainly off link building, this is an extremly important factor in SEO, many poeple view it as being the most important part of SEO.

Below we will look at the main factors in Onsite Optimization and explain the best practices.

1. Title Tags
2. Meta Description
3. H Tags
4. Image Alt Tags
5. Page URL and Canonical issues
6. Internal Link Struture

Title Tags
A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. It is the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content). The title tag is meant to describe accurately the content of the page.

Good Example


Best Practices
It it best to keep your title tag below 70 characters, as this is the limit search engines will displays in search results. The best format for title tags in my opinion is - Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword, although you may want to use Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name instead. Either one is good.

Remember keep the title tag below 70 characters and place your most important keywords nearer the front.

Resource
http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_title.asp

Meta Description
Although meta description tags do not hold any direct value in the search engines, they are very very very useful in getting users to click through to your site when they are viewing the search engine results page. Meta descriptions basically allow you to add a short description of your web page that will appear on the search engine results page.

When writing the meta description for your website you use your keywords wisely, do not overuse them. The description should be interesting and also be appealing to people. The description should directly relate to the page, as a standard practice the meta description should not exceed 160 characters in length.

Good Example

Resources
Bing's official view on Meta descriptions- http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2009/07/18/head-s-up-on-lt-head-gt-tag-optimization-sem-101.aspx

H Tags
The correct use of H tags used to have a decent effect on improving the SEO of a site. This seems to be decreasing and the amount of influence that the H tags carry in Google and the other search engines is minimal. This doesn't mean that you should ignore H tags tho. It is good practice to use them and also helps with accessibility and usability of your website.

Resource
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_hn.asp

Image Alt Tags
When adding a image to your website, image alt tags should always be used. Search engines cannot read images, they read the image alt tag instead. These are important in SEO and should always be used. The image you add to your website should be relevant to the content of the page and the image alt should describe the image( ideally using your keywords).

Good Example


Resource
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp

Page URL
A URL is text which is readable by humans that was designed to replace the IP addresses that computers use to communicate with servers. They also identify the file structure of a website.

URLs are a very important factor in SEO, they should:
- Use hyphens to separate words. They should not use underscores, spaces or any other characters.
- Never be longer than 2,048 characters as Internet Explorer won't be able to load the page.
- Not ideally use parameters. If they need to be used the amount of parameters should be limited to two or fewer.

Best Practice
When browsing the web you may notice web addresses that look something like this - http://www.example/sub/12343152315/fdaf.html. This is a very poor URL structure, it doesn't contain any of your keywords or have any relevance to the page. Your URL's should ideally look like this - http://www.fashionstore.co.uk/mens/trousers/blue-jeans.html/. This URL contains all your keywords and also is relevant to the page it leads too.

Bad Example


Good Example


Internal Link Structure
The internal link structure of your website is a crucial part of SEO. There are many things to consider.

1. Link Categorization
This site feature is technically termed as 'navigability'. While developing a website for success, you should pay careful attention to the categories and subcategories that you create. All the internal linking on your site should be 'relevant'. The link structure should be appropriately optimized, both for people and search engines. Keep the 'task flow' alive throughout the site.

2. Anchor Text
The next important thing that you need to consider is the anchor text linking of your website. Today's users are smarter. Anchor text links like 'Click Here' are almost dead. Webmasters should try to use anchor text that entice users to click links. You should use call-to-action anchor text like 'creating an ad campaign', 'improve direct mail response', 'designs that really work' etc.

3. Redundancy
Here, redundancy refers to repetition of links. You should not link the same page double or three times from the same place. For example, placing a 'Read More' link under a post title which already links to the corresponding page is redundancy. You should either link the post title (that appears on a list) or provide a 'Read More' or 'Continue Reading' link at the end of the two- or three-liners. Choose any one of the two options.

4. No-follow Attributes
While setting up the internal structure of a website, you will come across multiple links which are not so important. There may be some page links to which you do not want to pass on page rank. How do you solve this? For the very purpose, you have the no-follow tags available to you. Use these no-follow tags to your benefit and keep the search engines well informed.

5. Sitemap
An important part of a site's internal link structure is the creation of a well-defined sitemap. A sitemap keeps informed both search engines and people. It is a good idea to create both - a static sitemap (for users) and an XML sitemap (for search engines). Since well-explained sitemaps keep the search engines informed, it also helps obtain higher rankings.

6. Accessibility
Do not bury important web pages in deep links. Both in terms of usability guidelines and SEO, all the important pages on your site should not be more than two clicks away from the homepage. Search engines love to visit pages that are easily accessible from the website's homepage.

7. Dangling Links
Do not have web pages that prove to be a dead-end for users. Would you like the search engine spider to crawl a page which has 'nowhere to go'? These links can be termed as dangling links. If you have such pages on your site, you need to optimize them appropriately to improve the inner link structure.

8. Broken Links
Keep a close watch on all the internal links of your website to keep them error-free. Make sure your site does not have any error pages like 404 or 'Not Found'. There are various tools that you can use to detect such pages on your website. Fix these error pages as soon as you find them.

1. Page Rank
2. Incoming Links

Page Rank
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. Basically it shows how relevant a page is...

Incoming Links
Incoming links from other quality sites all extremley important in SEO, they carry a big influence on all the major search engines. You can quickly gain incoming links by writing articles(such as this one), contacting other webmasters, listing your site in free listings and so on you get the idea.

SEO is not something that will magically happen overnight it takes time and a lot of hard work. I've wrote this article which i hope you will useful to guide you through the initial step of optimizing your website. If you have any questions regarding this article or web design in general please feel free to contact me - My Web Design Site.