SEO - A Beginners guide

All righty then, time for a more technical blog post from moi! Let’s tackle some basic best practices to help optimise your website. Considering this is a beginner’s guide I guess I should explain the term Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In a nutshell SEO helps search engines find your site when a user types a search term into the search engine (the most popular of these being Google). There are a variety of techniques you can use to achieve the best possible result, which I will discuss individually.

You should base your sites optimisation decisions on what is best for the readers of your site rather than just to improve your ranking. Incremental changes to small sections of your site will make all the difference.

1. Create unique, accurate page titles
List the most important key phrases first…creating a hierarchy of importance. The title for your homepage can list the name of your website/business and could include other bits of important information like the physical location of the business. You shouldn’t write your companies name here but rather the service you offer followed by your location i.e. web design Northampton!

Good practices for page title tags

2. Accurately describe the page’s content – Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.

3. Create unique title tags for each page – Each of your pages should ideally have a unique title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.

4. Use brief, but descriptive titles – Titles can be both short and informative. If the title is too long, Google will show only a portion of it in the search result.

5. Make use of the “description” Meta tag
The description meta tag are the first few lines a user will read before they enter the site, so give a brief summary of what your site is about, or take the first paragraph from the sites body copy. These pieces of information appear above the pages url and below a pages title text in a search result. Make sure each piece of description text is relevant to that page rather than duplicating content.

6. Use unique descriptions for each page

7. Improve the structure of your URLs
Use appropriate terms within your url’s…remember that these are a key area for search. Making the url title descriptive will also tell the user what the page is about before they arrive there.

8. Make your site easier to navigate
Make your navigation keyword friendly and descriptive – i.e. Agriwheel tools instead of tools. Create a natural flow for your hierarchy. Try to make your navigation text based, if you want to use a flash alternative make sure that you have a text version on your page.

9. Create a html sitemap listing all your pages and create a structure with titles etc so it makes sense.

10. Have a useful 404 page

11. Offer quality content and services
Quality, readable content is the key to users visiting your site and creating a buzz. Get the basics right like correct spelling and grammar. Take other obvious steps like breaking your text down to readable chunks, using paragraphs, Header tags, lists etc. Use relevant language which your users might search for.

12. Create fresh, unique content- Make sure your content isn’t duplicated or rehashed otherwise Google will spot this and not give credit to your copy.

13. Write better anchor text
This is important because it shows Google where your link is going, so this link should relate to the title of the page it is linking too. Avoid generic anchor text like click here or read more as this offers no link bait. Keep the anchor text short / concise as well. Another seemingly obvious point is to make sure links are easily visible and distinguishable form the body text.

14. Use heading tags appropriately
Use a variation of heading tags where appropriate (These vary form h1 to h6) and use these sparingly to help create a hierarchical structure to your page.

15. Optimize your use of images
Make sure you apply alt and title text to all images, if for whatever reason the image won’t appear. Also when you hover your mouse over the image the relevant text will appear. If you are using the image as a link the alt text will be treated in the same way as anchor text. Make sure when naming images they are descriptive and relevant as well. Store images in a directory of their own i.e. web / images simplifying the path to your images and making the location concistent.

16. Make effective use of robots.txt
A “robots.txt” file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named “robots.txt”, is placed in the root directory of your site.

Follow these points and you’ll give yourself a great chance to take the Search out of SEO!

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