Search Engine Optimization
In this article I will outline a few search engine optimization (SEO) techniques which you should try to follow when designing your webpages. Following these basic principles will allow your sites to be listed by search engines most effectively. I will could and will write a full length article on each SEO technique so this article will act as an overview.
What is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization is where specific conventions are followed in order to make a website rank as high on search engine results as possible. Over recent years the need demand for high ranking in popular search engines has skyrocketed and as a result web designers were encouraged to up skill and to adapt SEO techniques for clients.
Basic Search Engine Optimisation Conventions
The first step before you begin optimizing is to decide on a series of keywords or phrases that you think you will be able to get traffic from.
I find the keyword selector tool located on the website inventory.overture.com to be particularly handy when making this decision as it will tell you how many searches in one month there was for a particular term. For example in January 2007 the phrase ‘dog breeders’ was searched 139,327 times.
Keyword density
If you wish a particular keyword or key phrase to be associated with your website in order to tap into the search traffic for the term, then you need to repeat the main phrase multiple times throughout each article. Using the previous example, the phrase ‘dog breeders’ would need to be saturated throughout the article body.
Text images
An important issue which needs to be taken into consideration when designing the ‘look’ of your website is use of images. Search engines currently do not use image recognition software on images. This means that when a search engine crawls your website for content, all text which is included within an image will not be added to their index. It is therefore vitally important to ensure text is predominantly situated outside images.
I have seen many websites which have their entire pages content saved to an image file and as a result a search engine such as Google will not have any significant material in which to rank the page.
Page title
The page name (text located within the <title> tags) of each webpage is important. It is the page name which appears at the top of each search engine listing before the description snippet. Search engines give particular weighting to the keywords which appear in the pages title. For example a website about breeding dogs would be better to use the page title ‘Dog Breeding Techniques’ apposed to a name such as ‘Welcome to our Webpage’ as many sites unfortunately do. If the search engine spiders finds content in the page to support that of the title the page will rank higher.
File names
The name of the html document should be chosen in a similar way to that of the page title. For the previous example of a ‘Dog Breeding Techniques’ titled page, that document name should be ‘dog-breeding-techniques.htm’ or ‘dog_breeding_techniques.htm’. Keep the file name short while at the same time ensuring your main keywords exist hyphenated in the name. The title of merely ‘techniques.htm’ for example would not be enough for the ‘Dog Breeding Techniques’ page.
Weighted text
When writing the articles for your website try to add addition weight to important keywords, subheadings and titles. For example the ‘Dog Breeding Techniques’ page should have a title somewhere on the pages body with a weighting of heading one (h1). The code which would need to be wrapped around the title needs to be something like the following:
<h1>Dog Breeding Techniques</h1>
Meta Tags
Meta tags are a part of the html code which define the origins and purpose of each page.
Keywords - Place keywords within the following tag: <meta name="keywords" content=”Keywords go here”/> The tag needs to be placed within the <head> tags of the html document.
Keywords should be short and must appear in the content of the current page.
<meta name="keywords" content=”dog breeders, dog breeding”/>
Description - The description is also significant as it will appear in the search result text viewed by the searchers. Try to place something here that will attract attention to your targeted audience.
<meta name="description" content="Helpful info about dog breeding.”/>
Website depth
The website depth is basically how many clicks away from the home page a page is. If the only way to navigate to a page on your website is by click 3 different links then there is some depth. Pages in deeper levels of your site will have a low Google page rank opposed to those in higher levels, and therefore the deeper pages will not rank as high. Try to keep the pages in your website 1 or 2 clicks away from your homepage, certainly no more than 3 clicks is recommended.
Where to go from here
Step 1 - The first step as mentioned is to BRAINSTORM WEBSITE IDEAS.
Step 2 - Then you need to PICK A DOMAIN NAME which is recommended. For less than $10 the benefits of having a domain name far outweigh this initial cost.
Step 3 - Then you need to either LEARN TO HAND CODE your website or LEARN TO USE WEBDESIGN SOFTWARE to design and upload your site.
Step 4 - Now you need to GET CONNECTED WITH A WEBHOST to make your website viewable by the world.
Step 5 -Finally you need to Market and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZE your completed website to increase the number of visitors..