Understanding the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO)
A great, well laid out web site with excellent content and no visitors is an invisible website. Sure SEO is a buzz phrase, but in essence SEO is the process by which you bring targeted traffic to your site and it is something you can acquire enough knowledge about to do much of it yourself should you so choose. Targeted is the optimum word in that last sentence. You really do not want all and sundry on your site. It is about bringing potential clients to your site who are looking for your services, who will hire you and pay for them.
SEO is about keywords, the words you choose to describe your business. It is those keywords that will bring people to your site and raise you up in the search results.
The first thing is to try and understand how your web site currently performs in search engine rankings. Have you any idea? There are several free page ranking tools that you can use to help you.
It’s also important to check your referrer log regularly. This will help you to know where your visitors are coming from and which search terms in particular they are using to find your web site.
And now back to the aforementioned keywords. You should be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every page of your site, including the content, the page URL’s and even the captions on any images too. Think about what words people might use to find your web site. Then make sure you sink them in. It is not just a single word too. It could be a short phrase made up of several words. Just one word of caution though. If you over populate your content with the same keyword, your site will become labelled as a ‘spammer’. The result? Search engine spiders will simply ignore your site. So
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be careful and as a rule of thumb, 3% to 5% of your content as a keyword or phrase is plenty.
A very basic, yet effective SEO strategy is to create internal links into your site. It is a simple way of boosting traffic and getting people moving around your site. So ensure you have a sitemap, which is simply a page that lists a link to all other pages on your web site. This makes it very easy for search engine spiders and the
easier you make it, the better your rankings are likely to be.
Creating search friendly URLs is of critical importance – these are the page descriptors at the top of every web page. A search engine’s job is to feed back the most relevant information to match what the searcher is looking for. So the URL needs to tell the search engine what is on that page and no surprises. Consider these two URL’s:
It is plain to see which one will excite search engines more.
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