One of the most effective ways of doing this is through search engine optimisation, designed to maximise your site‘s listings on search engines such as Google.
According to Adam Price, creator of SEO Sitebuilder, search engine optimisation is a science that can take many years to master but there are a number of tips that can help you improve your performance in this area with relatively little effort.
“The many aspects involved in website development occur both on and off-page,” he says. “This means that your website will only start ranking highly on the search engines if you combine many different elements.
“The following tips are something that you can look to employ, although the way your website has been technically developed will also have a major impact,” he added. “Finding a good partner who is able to develop your website to make it search engine friendly should be a high priority.”
SEO Sitebuilder recommends the following tips to boost your site‘s rankings:
1. You should always avoid hidden text and other techniques to try and fool the search engines. The search engines are becoming extremely intelligent and are fully aware of all the rogue techniques that can be used. If the search engines spot any trickery you will be marked down and sometimes even blacklisted. Good search engine companies would never use any of these techniques.
2. Try to stay away from using ’Flash‘ navigation, especially creating your whole site in Flash. This is a big ’no-no when it comes to search engines as it is impossible for the spiders that they send out to look into a Flash movie for text content explaining what your site is about.
3. Content is King. Ensure that your website provides valid information for the visitors. It is in the search engines‘ best interest to highly rank websites that people will actually like and gain benefit from, so make sure you provide enough content to make it worth while for people to visit. Generally a five-page website would not be classed as an information resource and the search engines will be looking for more.
4. Getting other people to link to your website is fantastic but bear in mind that they have to be relevant. The search engines will be able to recognise if the links are irrelevant and can take a view that you maybe using some form of link farm service which is frowned upon.
5. Choose
an SEO partner wisely. There are many ’cowboys‘ in this industry that
will try to convince you that they know what they are doing when really
they don‘t have a clue. There are a number of questions that you can
ask an SEO company to find out if they really know what they are
talking about. The best way to test them is ask to see results: what
have they done for other companies? Can they prove what they say they
can do? Here‘s a tip, make sure they tell you what domain you should
find before they show you any results.
6. Try
and avoid Javascript Navigation. Typically, this is used to produce
pretty fly out menus with lovely rollovers and colours that look all
very nice on your website. The trouble with this type of menu is that
spiders really can‘t understand any content within Javascript and, as
this is where all your page links are, you would really like them to be
found.
7. Remember that site
maps are a fantastic way for spiders to be able to collect as much
information about your website as possible. If possible, provide a
Google site map as this will be directly related to Google‘s own
specification.
8. Alt tags and
title tags are a fantastic way to get more valid information about your
website in to the search engines. Alt tags are the little tool tips of
text that appear when you hover your mouse pointer over an image. The
title tag will be the little tool tips of text that appear when you
hover your mouse pointer over any text links on the page.
9. Don‘t be afraid to use bullet points to emphasise selected pieces of text but don‘t use them without providing supporting information otherwise this could be seen as keyword stuffing.
10. Duplicate content. This is becoming an important issue to the search engines, especially Google. Make sure that you do not have the same content on any of your pages with in your website or even the same as another website. This is frowned upon and can even result in your website being moved to what‘s call the supplemental listings, which essentially is a secondary database.
Adam Price is the managing director of IT3.com and creator of the Microsoft award-winning SEO Sitebuilder. For more information please visit www.seositebuilder.com
