Search Engine Optimization Tips

Posted by David | Filed under Web Design Tips

Recently a couple of my clients have asked me about getting their websites to the top of the search engine listings, and I’ve had to do a bit of Search Engine Optimization to help them out. This is quite a simple process contrary to what many believe, ensuring that a search engine spider doesn’t miss anything important on your website.

Some useful things anyone can do to SEO their website.

  • Firstly when buying your domain name make it a relevant one! Usually this would be the company name as you want your company website coming top in the listings when search for! However you could consider a keyword domain for certain websites.
  • Secondly relevant titles and descriptions, ensure that your page titles are to the point, and describe what is on the page, Google takes a significant interest in page titles, and remember that it is what a person querying a search engine will see first so make a good impression and make it obvious what the page is about from there!
  • Thirdly use friendly URLs, I know that sometimes this isn’t possible, in particular I have had a lot of trouble using these on Lycos servers, but they do help, a friendly URL has key terms in about your web page which can be read by the search engine spiders and help your listings, it also looks nicer than index.php?p=123 or whatever numerical value the CMS you are using may give without friendly URLs turned on.
  • Ensure the keywords are there on the page! It’s important to make sure you include your keywords in the top paragraph of your website. It’s also important to ensure there is not too much content on one page, make sure you split content across multiple pages this not only is beneficial to spiders who may fail to reach the bottom of a long page but it also helps the reader by breaking up the text.
  • Ensure the “alt” and “description” tags on your images have been done correctly. If you show a picture of a dog a search engine spider cannot read the picture so you must use these tags to ensure they can. The more specific you are the better.
  • Page descriptions, keywords META tags etc. Are all important ensure that you do not use too many keywords though,  I would recommend a maximum  of 10 but you should try stick to 5, as for description this should be no longer than 20-30 words.

 <META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”This is a description of my site.”>

<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”tools, bananas, eggs, apples, beetroot”>   

  • Robots.txt make sure you use a robots.txt in the root of your domain especially if you are using WordPress or a similar CMS, this will prevent search engine spiders from indexing your subdirectories, which do not look pretty in the search engine! More information on Robots.txt and how to write one will be given in a later article.
  • Ensure your site sticks to web standards! You can check your website at the W3C Markup Validation Service.
  • Relevant links, links is a bit of a funny one, you have to be careful not to submit your link to the wrong place! Link Farms are bad! The best sites to get links from are related websites to yours.
  • Sitemaps are also an important tool to use and many search engines these days  will allow submission of an XML sitemap these can be generated by one of many websites for free.
  • Finally, Relevant content, this is so important for spiders, and the more you put on and the more frequently you put it on the more they will come back, but don’t copy you will be penalised for copying other sites. The Do Nots of SEOing will be coming soon!

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Permalink | Comments (2) | Friday, 8th Aug 2008

2 Responses to “Search Engine Optimization Tips”

  1. Egor Says:
    August 14th, 2008 at 8:53 am

    Hello webmaster I was browsing Internet searching for Meta Tags Optimization and your blog regarding Engine Optimization Tips | David’s Blog came my way. Very interesting! You really do know your thing! I\’m gonna bookmark you and come back in a few to see your new posting! Looking forward to! Cheers!

  2. The “Do Not’s” of SEOing | David's Blog Says:
    August 14th, 2008 at 9:46 am

    [...] not to SEO! Following my article on how to SEO I thought I should write a second one telling you how not [...]

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