Five tips for optimising your web content for search engines
Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing use a number of factors to rank the relevance of websites for various search terms so they can provide relevant web page links for people when they enter a query into a search engine.
While the exact formula, or algorithm, used by each search engine to rank pages is a fiercely guarded secret (to prevent people trying to cheat the system), there are a number of things you can do that are believed to help search engines index your site, which in turn, should improve your position on a search engine results page and increase the chances of your business being found online.
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Use keywords
The use of carefully chosen keywords is likely to make or break your attempts at Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as far as content goes. Brainstorm a collection of relevant words and phrases that people might use when looking for a business like yours, and then select and target only three relevant keywords or phrases on each web page.
You should:
- Avoid targeting jargon and technical keywords and focus on simple niche keywords that will drive qualified traffic to your website. For example, a website design company would be better off targeting words like 'website design' and 'web pages' than words or phrases like 'customised Internet solutions'.
- Avoid overusing your selected keywords and phrases. Keyword-heavy text is difficult to read and if overdone, could result in search engines penalising you by reducing your relevancy ranking for those words if they think you're trying to unduly influence their ranking system. As a guide, aim to use each keyword or phrase naturally within the text and don't repeat each more than three times on a page.
Meta tags
Meta description tags and meta keyword tags can be included in the HTML code of your website. The meta description gives a brief outline of the web page content and the meta keywords allow you to list the keywords that are relevant to that web page.
Meta tags used to be an important part of SEO, but abuse of meta tags (by cramming them with unrelated keywords) has resulted in meta tags playing a lesser role in SEO, with experts believing that some search engines disregard them entirely.
The extent to which meta tags are currently used by search engines is unknown, but they're worth including in your code to improve your ranking with search engines that do use them. Google, for example, will often include the meta title description as the text that appears below the page link on the search engine results page.
Article titles
It is widely believed that search engines place considerable importance on the text you use in your article title tag. This means that giving your home page the title of 'home page' is not good for SEO. You should think more strategically and give it a keyword-rich title like 'ABC website design'. Similarly, your sales site shouldn't have titles like 'products 1', and 'products 2', but rather more descriptive titles such as 'camping and hiking tents' or 'climbing and safety equipment'.
Headings and sub-headings
Don't forget to use keywords in your main heading and sub-heading tags. The reasoning is that words used in titles, which are usually in a large font and in bold or a different colour, are likely to be more important – and as a result might carry a heavier weighting in some or all search engine algorithms.
Web page content and links
As a rule of thumb, you should include 250 words of text on every web page to ensure search engine robots index the page. Write your text with your intended audience in mind and tweak it to include your chosen two or three keywords, rather than the other way around.
If you're linking to other web pages, try to use text and keywords in the link for better SEO results. Rather than using "Click here for more information", with the "here" containing your hyperlink, use a call to action and keywords in the text - for example, "Find out more about ABC website design", with the hyperlink on "ABC website design". Choose the sites you link to carefully, again targeting your audience. Don't just consider standard websites; a blog regarding a relevant subject to your industry might be a great place to attract traffic from.
Ultimately, content quality is king. The more unique the content on your website, the more it will be optimised for high search engine rankings. As other sites link to your site and traffic grows, the site will start to require less SEO maintenance and tweaking by you. Then all you would have to do is keep refreshing content while monitoring the load times of your site – because the longer it takes to load, the less traffic you'll receive.
