What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation - is the activity of making sure that your website is written in such a way that search engines can find you. More recently the term SEO has also come to include the activity of marketing your website through search engines (pay per click etc). It is an activity that some companies do not invest in at all whilst others spend huge resources in this area. Tesco are reported to spend £100,000 a month on this activity.
What are Search Engines?
Search engines are the tools that we use to search for our information on the internet. I use Google most of the time, so for example if I want to search for a website company in Woking I might go to www.google.com and enter "websites woking", on the first page (hopefully!) you should see the link to this website Budget Websites. Whilst Google is currently one of the most used search engines, it's not the only one and SEO applies to them all.
How do Search Engines Work?
There is no published list of tricks that will work for all search engines. Search engines will not publish a list of how to get on the front page, and if you think about it then there is an obvious reason for this. Search engines want to be good at what they do, they want to return to the user a selection of websites that are relevant to the search. If search engines published a list of tricks and tips then web developers would use them to manipulate search results – in effect Tesco with it's £100,000 might use this list to ensure that it was returned on irrelevant searches. This is clearly not useful for the search engines or the users. Similarly search engines are constantly evolving their technology all wanting to make sure that they deliver the relevant information to the end user.
So how do You "do" SEO?
This is my top 10 list of things that need to be done to make sure a website is optimised.
- Write the website in valid XHTML/CSS and free from errors. This keeps the code clean, accessible and enforces correct usage of H1, H2 tags etc.
- Links – Google loves links. Get people linking to your website from theirs.
- Use no more then 10 keywords/phrases and add them to the meta data.
- Use a different set of keywords for each page in your website.
- Make sure that the description in the meta data is short, utilising some of the keywords but also inviting customers in. Search engines might display this section in the search results.
- Make sure that the page title is unique for each page and uses some of your keywords.
- Use keywords in your headings with in the text.
- Ensure that the keywords are in fact key, if you have the word in the meta data, title and heading it should also be in the body text.
- Use alt tags for images. The alt tag should be a description of the image – hopeful it would include a keyword.
- Adding a text link menu at the bottom of the page is not only great for adding some extra relevant links and keywords, but also to help customers to find valuable information.
- Keep it honest; (I know I said 10 – but this one is important too!) Only select keywords that are in fact relevant to the webpage. Keep the text on the pages readable, it would be totally daft to have the website optimised for search engines but not for your customers!
Things Not to do…
NEVER use entire Flash websites, unless you are prepared to create a XHMTL/CSS version to accompany it. Flash animation in small amounts is fine, but always use the alt tag to indicate what the content is.
Is that it?
Nope. To make sure the website is SEO, ideally you need to monitor the position on Google, monitor user statistics and change keywords/text accordingly. All our websites come integrated with Google analytics packages (for monitoring website statistics and usage). In addition our customers who have purchased SMART will have direct access to manage their keywords/text/headings/alt tags. We can offer assistance with this if it sounds a bit time consuming. We won't recommend that you spend £100,000/month but perhaps you might like to just purchase an hour a week of our time at £50…we can't guarantee top results but we are certain that it would help.
This SEO Sounds Complicated!!
Well you don't need to worry about that, Budget Websites will do most of the hard work for you. We will ask you for some key words and we will ask you for your text. If the text on the website is changed slightly, perhaps and few extra headings and some keywords added/altered – at least you now know why!
Well done for reading this far!
