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DIY Web Site Optimisation TutorialThe basics of search engine optimisation and website promotion start just like like any other business offline - A wee bit of MARKETING! What do I mean by marketing? Well spending a bit of time discovering or at least deciding who your TARGET AUDIENCE is likely to be, who your immediate COMPETITORS are and what do you offer that is better than the rest? In other words what's your USP (Unique Selling Point). Get this bit right and you'll make life a lot easier for yourself in the coming months. And the reason WHY! - well optimising your site for the search engines is one thing, getting traffic through to your site is another and finally, but most importantly, it all boils down to converting that traffic into buying customers - Which funnily enough leads me on to Step 1. of search engine optimisation for the search engines and directories. Step 1. Build Good ContentImagine this scenario - You've built your site, you've carried out every possible ethical (perhaps non-ethical also, that's your choice) on page basic coding including keyword phrase selection and positioning and have built a solid linking strategy and implemented it. Finally you've got top spot for your chosen keywords - LOADS of traffic coming through your site, but wait a minute! NO CUSTOMERS...doh! This is the age of the World Wide Web, customers can afford to pick and choose just by the click of a mouse and they want more, much more than what they would normally expect in a highstreet shop. So start off by building great content that offers so much more. You'll convert your customers, but you'll also generate traffic through people wanting to link to your great CONTENT full site. What do I mean by great content? Well imagine you have a business that sells mobile phones, your prices are market standard and so are the network prices you choose to sell and promote. In other words your business / website is the same as about 9 million others on the web. To stand out from the other 9 million we have to go further than just catalogue what we sell. You could add the following:
Adding some or all of the above will not only give the customer more, but you'll also be feeding the search engine spider more food to index, which will have a knock on effect of boosting your rankings. Step 2. Keyword Phrase PositioningOk, this should probably be the first step, but some of you may have come to this site having already built a website. I'm not going to go into the basics of keyword Research here as this is covered here: What I am going to discuss here is having done your research and selection process, where are the best places to put your keyword phrases... META tagsStarting from the top, use your most relevant keyword phrase in your HTML documents TITLE tag, like this: <head> Next move on to your META tags. There's no need to use all the different types of META tags, you only need the DESCRIPTION and KEYWORD tags. And even then many search engines do not use this information. But its better to use them than not. The DESCRIPTION and KEYWORD META tags look like this: <meta name="description" content="HG5 offers discount mobile phones with no minimum contract on any mobile phone network. Java games and ringtones also available"> <meta name="keywords" content="discount mobile phones o2 t-mobile orange vodafone free ringtones java games"> Make sure your description META tag has relevant keyword rich information that entices. Some search engines and directories use the DESCRIPTION meta tag as the summary of your site. So make sure its a crowd puller. Just use the most relevant keywords for that page in the KEYWORDS meta tag. There's no need to go overboard and list your complete range of kyewords. Treat each page of your site as individual and use keywords and descriptions that relate to that pages content. <Hn> tagsMoving on further down your page - If your page uses headings and sub-headings place your keyword phrases within the <Hn> tags. Start off with <H1> for your main heading and work down. You can easily set the value of a <Hn> using CSS, so that the heading fits in with your website design. Body CopyUsing your selected keyword phrases for this page, no more than say 3 phrases and obviously related, you want to sprinkle them about your website copy. Just sit down and write some copy for the page in question of about 250 - 350 words, then check it to make sure it all makes sense and you have not deliberately over used your phrases. If it reads like a list, you've got it wrong. Don't be too concerned with your phrase density, as long as you have it in there 3 or so times and it looks natural all will be fine. Make your keyword phrases standout by using <strong> or <b> and <i> or <em> tags. Don't go overboad and if it does not fit with your style of design, don't use them. NavigationUse your keyword phrases in your navigation menu. If you are using a graphical based menu ensure that you use <alt> tags with your images and place your keywords in the <alt> tags. Don't load up <alt> tags with keywords, just be relevant. Same goes for the use of <alt> tags on plain images. If its an image of a certain make and model of mobile phone and that is one of your keyword phrases place it in your <alt> tag. Incoming Anchor TextSome search engines predominantly rank your website on incoming links. So make sure you use your keyword phrases in incoming links. If you are not sure what I mean by that follow this example; Your keyword phrase is 'Mobile Phones' and we want to use that as our ANCHOR TEXT for incoming links. The HTML code would look like this: <a href="http://www.somesite.com">Mobile Phones</a> So if you are sending out emails for reciprocal link requests, you'd be using something similar to the above code, ensuring that you use your keyword phrase in the ANCHOR TEXT. Don't use your domain name as anchor text, UNLESS it relates directly to your products / services. This is fine <a href="http://www.cheapmobilephones.com">Cheap Mobile Phones</a> This is fine <a href="http://www.cheap-mobile-phones.com">Cheap Mobile Phones</a> This is not fine <a href="http://www.willywonka.com">www.willywonka.com</a> This is fine <a href="http://www.willywonka.com">Cheap Mobile Phones</a> See my article on Domain Name Selection for further information on choosing the right domain name. One last thing on anchor text and that is vary them. Don't use the same anchor text on 1000 incoming links. Use different anchor text and point them to different pages of your site. For example; you sell mobile phones, but you also do Mobile Phone Ratings. So get some links coming into your site using the phrase Mobile Phone Ratings and point them directly to your ratings page. Step 3. Building Processin the actual building process of your site work on the basis of 'Less is Best' when referring to HTML code. Try not to bloat your web pages with unnecessary code, like HTML, Javascript or indeed Flash. Search engine spiders are looking for TEXT and lots of it as that's the spiders favourite food. If you are using such things as mousover rollovers use a script that you can place into an external .js file, better still use CSS to make the rollover effect. The same with CSS, place it all in external files. If you don't know CSS yet, start to learn it and implement it in your website design. It will reduce your code down dramtically. Using things such as tables has always been a code bloat, try to use CSS for positioning rather than tables. The bottom line is aim for more text than code. Ensure your pages load fast. Many of us have broadband access nowadays, but there are still many more using snailup, I mean dialup access. Ensure you have set your images WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes and keep your images small in size. If your images are large, slice em up and use CSS to position them rather than tables. Finally, use good form as in proper HTML code for the version you are using - Syntactically correct. You'd not believe I've said that if you look at my code. Step 4. Link BuildingI've touched on the subject slightly above regarding ANCHOR TEXT, but for full information see my Link Building Advice section. Finally...If you are looking for some automated software to help you in your quest for top dog position on all the major search engines, I can highly recommend the Internet Business Promoter package. Taken straight from the horses mouth "IBP offers everything you need to successfully promote your web site. IBP is a suite of 10 professional web promotion tools that help you with all aspects of web site promotion and search engine optimization."Costa de la Luz Spanish Property |
