At a quick glance these are a few things to be aware of:
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 see 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 5 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, 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! I’m afraid to say but 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, these are 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 which can’t hurt.
8. Alt Tags & 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 of using bullet points to emphasise selected pieces of text but don’t use them without providing supporting information otherwise this could be seen as key word 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.
One for free!
11. Concentrate on writing good quality content and remember to apply the 10 tips above, all search engines will appreciate this more. Don’t try to over optimise your website or focus on any one single search engine.
“The tips I have given are key factors that you should examine closely to ensure an effective online presence. Search Engine Optimisation is a science that takes many years to learn and master, along with this the technology involved is continually developing and changing. The many aspects involved in website development occur both on and off page, this means that your website will only start ranking highly on the search engines if you combine many different elements. The tips above are something that you can look to employ, however the way your website has been technically developed (e.g the programming) will also have a major impact. Therefore finding a good partner who is able to develop your website to make it search engine friendly should be a high priority.
With online presence becoming increasingly competitive it is vitally important to get your website highly ranked. Once this is achieved and you have got people to your site the next step is to determine how to convert visits into sales. There are a few tools emerging that can help with this also, one to watch being ‘seo live support’ but we can talk about this in another issue….”
Entrepreneur of the Year 2007, Adam Price is the MD of IT3.com and creator of the Microsoft Award Winning SEO Sitebuilder. For more information please visit www.seositebuilder.com
