print page | bookmark page | email page | contact | animation

Home About Examples Contact Blog CSS xhtml PHP Javascript mySQL Accessibility Newsletters Traffic Spam Email Webmail Netiquette Legal RSS Newsfeed Domains Hosting eCommerce SEO Google Website Design Web Standards Web 2.0 Bandwidth Flash Beginners Guide

SEO

The definition of optimise is “make the best or most effective use of (a situation, opportunity, or resource)”. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) means to make the best or most effective use of search engines like Google or Yahoo to attract visitors to your site.

Everybody wants to be at the top of the search results list because if you are not on the first or second page of results most people are not going to see your entry and won’t come to your site.

There are lots of people claiming to improve your ranking, but such claims should be treated with a certain amount of suspicion. There are things that can be done to improve your chances, but they require human input, thought and effort and none of them are automatic.

Google changed the face and the foundation of web searching. Instead of searching for sites by what they contained, Google started searching for sites that other people linked to. When other sites link to your site it shows that your site is useful. But links from sites with bad reputations will hurt your page ranking so not all linking is good. Relevance of the linking site is also important so one knitting web site linking to another knitting web site will carry more weight than a dog fancier site linking to a knitting site.

Getting other sites to link to you is tricky and you don’t just want any old site linking as that may adversely affect your ranking. Here are some things that one can do to improve your search ranking:

Make your site useful

The best way to get links is to make the site interesting or useful to the audience you want to attract. In short your content should be good. You can add links to other sites that are relevant to your site and this can help your ranking directly but mainly this may be a reason for other people to link to you.

Change your content frequently

Search engines monitor how often the content of your site changes. If it changes often, the engines come back to index your site more frequently and they also consider it to be more interesting because it is more active. Adding a blog or an rss news feed is a good way to make a site more dynamic.

Get in relevant directories

There are lots of on line directories and some are going to be relevant to you business or organisation. Getting listed is often free. A free listing is usually going to be as good as a paid for entry in terms of search engines.

Use XHTML and CSS so site content is indexed correctly

By separating the content and the formatting search engines are able to index the words and meanings in your site much more efficiently. Search engines cannot read words in Flash files or text held as images so these are to be avoided. There are lots of technical dos and don’ts that are really down to your web developer to understand and follow. Google provides a lot of advice which applies to them and to other sites http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/webmasters/.

Consider using a sponsored ad

Google allows you to place an ad on their site when visitors search for specific words. This means the ad is only shown to relevant searchers and you still only pay if the visitor actually clicks on your ad. The amount you pay is based on the popularity of the words you choose to display the ad under. If being in the search results is important to you this may be a cost effective way of getting the prime position in those results.

Getting search rankings up is a process that begins with the design and construciotn of a site and follows through in the promotion, use and maintenance of the site. There is no magic bullet that will shoot you to the top of the rankings. But over time, we can help and increase your search result position.

Home | Previous | Next | Top