Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO has become an industry in its own right with numerous companies specialising in Internet marketing. They offer a myriad of services from optimizing the content on your website to launching a full blown online marketing campaign.
As a web developer the SEO I offer is to ensure all websites are designed using strict XHTML & CSS , using tableless design. Then the optimisation techniques used on all websites adhere to the principles outlined by Google in a guide that they themselves have published.
The guide covers a number of steps that are to be incorporated within a website to achieve high rankings with the search engine results.
The following is a brief summary of some of the methods I use from the Google SEO Guide
Create unique & accurate Page Titles
Each web page needs to have a unique title and it should accurately describe the content that will be on that web page. The title needs to be descriptive but not too long and be readable both to users and search engines. i.e. avoid stuffing it with keywords unnecessarily
Make use of the “keywords” & “description” meta tags
Keywords placed in the meta tags of a web page are words or phrases that will be indexed by the Search Engines. Their aim is to guide visitors to your website by trying to match your keywords & keyphrases with the search terms that the the user will use.
A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. A web page's description meta tag might be an interesting sentence or two or a short paragraph relating to what content is likely to be found on your website. A snippet of that paragraph in a search result could entice users into clicking through to your website.
Create an intuitive structure of the URLs (web addresses)
Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the pages on your website can not only help you keep the site better organized, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by
Search engines.Using relevant words in the URL and having a simple structure to the website makes it easy for visitors to know where they're at on your site.
Make the website easy to navigate
The navigation of a website is important to help visitors quickly find exactly what they are looking for. A well structured website with an intuitive hierarchy makes it easier for users to go from general content to a more specific item they are looking for on your site.
As attractive as Flash can make a website look its always important to use text for navigation. Many Search engines can discover animated links and also a number business places have disabled websites with Flash so if used its good practise to have HTML sitemap page on your site, and use an XML Sitemap file.
Offer quality content and services
Good quality content is always king. Well written and readable content makes your site easy to follow and more likely to attract visitors to stay on your website for more than a nano second.
Good copy written with search engine optimisation techniques will increase your position in Google and increase traffic to your website leading to a healthy conversion rate.
It is important not to copy content from existing websites and to write original copy that is aimed at a user and not simply stuffed with keywords that are directed at search engines.most out of your website..
Use heading tags appropriately
In HTML we have Header tags H1, H2, H3 which are used to present structure to a web page. This will subdivide the content making it easy for a visitor to quickly scan or read the page. Give some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use those heading tags appropriately.
Optimize your use of images
Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text for all images. Avoid using generic filenames and stuffing in excessive keywords in the alt tag.
Make effective use of robots.txt
The inclusion of a robots.txt file in the root directory of your site gives instructions to the web robots used by Search Engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site.
Take advantage of Google's web analytics services
A useful tool to use if you are interested in the traffic coming to your website is Google Analytics. It is free gives valuable insights into how many visitors you get and other useful information:
• get insight into how users reach and behave on your site
• discover the most popular content on your site
• measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site (e.g. did changing those title and
description meta tags improve traffic from search engines?)
Its up to you if you want to make use of this tool or not. All you need to do is create an account with Google and a bit of code needs to be inserted onto your web pages at that’s it.
and finally.....
To offer quickly a moment of soap box, there does seem to be millions of companies out there each claiming to get your website on the first page of Google's search results. It would be wise be wary of their statements and before diving into a contract with these companies find out exactly what they are offering for the money they will charge and where possible try to get some references from previous clients.