Search Engine Basics
Basics of search engine optimisation
As an SEO consultant it is my job to ensure a website is properly optimised to achieve its highest possible rankings in the search engines. An important point to remember when first optimising your site is that there are no ‘guaranteed top positions’, no ‘instant results’ and submitting your site to a million useless directories and search engines will do you more harm than good.
The fundamentals of SEO follow the principles of web standards for accessibility and useablity. By using properly structured pages that are easy to navigate, you will have a site that humans and search engines can both navigate easily.
There are no instant results!
First off, if you are expecting any easy simple solution to achieve quick results. There isn’t one. Instead the business of SEO involves hard work on some extremely repetitive tasks and care and creativity when it comes to the content for your site. Patience is the key here, results will not come overnight. You can typically expect your efforts to be realised months after you put the hard work in.
Write interesting and informative content
One of the single most important factors you need to consider is your websites content. This is crucial if you want people to find you on the web. You may have an incredible looking website, but a search engine reads text so you’d better have some incredible content too.
Writing good content doesn’t necessarily writing a thesis or essay, it is more about being factually and grammatically correct and providing a benefit to the user. An important concept to think about is, does your content add value to the page and communicate something useful to the reader. If it does then you are good to go, if not then you need to think about what would.
In simple terms a good content rich webpage will bring repeat visitors. Those repeat visitors who liked your business or agreed with what you had to say will most likely link to your site from theirs. You should know that having lots of links to your site is the most important factor for high search engine rankings, even more so if those links are coming from highly ranked authority websites.
Search engine robots love fresh content, they will visit your site more often and index your site deeper if you regularly add new content.
Write descriptive page titles
Your page title is the first thing people see of your site when sifting through the search results. By making your page titles descriptive and relevant, you will make it easier for them to understand what each page is about.
More importantly the search engines also use the page title as a factor when matching your page to a search query. Because of this the page title is arguably the most important element in ‘on page’ SEO.
When it comes to the structuring of the text in the title element, I would recommend using three keywords maximum per title and using a format similar to the following.
Page Name | Category name | Company name
It is important that every page on your site has a unique page title, if you keep them all the same you will make it harder for visitors and search engines to easily understand what each individual page is about.
Use the H tags
Use the h1 - h6 elements for headings. People use headings to understand the context of a page of text and so do the search engines. Text in the h1 - h6 tags are given more weight than regular text when used in a natural way to structure a page.
Use meta tags conservatively
Most search engines don’t place any great deal of value on the contents of meta tags anymore. They have been used way too much by spammers. I’d suggest using the meta description element, but that’s all. Keywords won’t hurt, but they will rarely help either, so they are generally not worth the effort.
Some search engines use the contents of the meta description element to describe your site in their search result listings, so if possible, make its contents unique and descriptive for every document.
Get incoming links to your website
Incoming links are very, very important for SEO. They are also possibly the hardest part of SEO to implement.