On-page optimization (website optimization) can be divided into two branches; factors that pertain to the structure of your website and factors that pertain to the content you write. As some of the UK’s top Search Engine optimisers, we have many tricks up our sleeves to make sure your site is ranking at the top of Google. Here are a few of the key ones:
Website Structure Factors:
• Domain: Before you pick a domain name you should know your target audience, and what you intend to sell to them. Try to use major keywords in your domain. Using a .com version of a URL is better than other versions.
• Contact page: Design a contact page and put your E-mail and mail address with phone number. Display this prominently on your site, with phone number and hours of business. Build trust!
• FAQ: design a Frequently Asked Question page. Save yourself time and show the customer you have their concerns foremost in your mind.
• About Us: It is necessary everyone visits your website knows who are you, so design an About Us page. Offer a photo of yourself and your team to add a human face to your business.
• Privacy Policy page: Make the first page of your website that is indexed in Yahoo the privacy page. Customers need reassurance that their details are in safe hands.
• Robots.txt file: Use a robots.txt file to limit access of search engines to your website.
• Site map page: Add a site map so that visitors and search engines can browse your pages easily.
• 404 error page: Create a 404 error page so that all mistakenly typed URL’s redirect to your homepage.
Content Optimization Factors: (optimization factors for every page)
• Page Title: use your keywords on page title.
• Use H1 header tags: put your topic in h1 header tag.
• Keywords Meta Tags
• Use Meta tag Keywords in Description
• Add image tags: use Alternative Image Text.
• Use H2 header tags for sub heading.
• Keyword Density: The percentage of times a keyword appears on your page, compared to the total number of words on the page.
Search engine optimisers
Lets explore a a typical situation. You know you need a website for your business but once it is up and running you breathe a sigh of relief then promptly forget about it. It’s one thing to have a presence online but how effectively is your website working for your business? Cyberspace is getting more crowded. So although you may have a competently designed website can your customers actually find you?
All search engines (others include Yahoo,MSN, AltaVista and AOL), want to gather as many websites as they can. This means that when someone does a search on a particular subject they can give the best possible search result. A search may bring up hundreds of thousands of different results. Most people will only look through the first few pages of a search result at most so you need your website to be near the top of that list. So how do search engines find your website and how you can best optimise your ranking?
According to leading search engine optimisers, making the most of your website is a four-step process incorporating keyword research, code review, search engine submissions and link farming.
“It is important to know what the most important keywords and search phrases are for the website so that a search engine can find it. The first step is to get a good understanding of the products and services from the website owners perspective and then to find out what people actually type into search engines when they are looking for these products and services.”
He advises that a good way for a business to find this out is to look at the monthly statistics. A quick way to do this is to go to: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Type in what you think people will search for when looking for your site and Overture will show related searches that include that term and the estimated number of times that term was searched in the last month. Also try going to www.highrankings.co.nz which offers access to free search engine ranking information.
New websites are ‘discovered’ by search engines such as Google in two different ways. Either someone (you or your web design company) can submit the site to the search engine by going to: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Otherwise a computer programme called a ‘spider’ sent from the search engine will find your site.
A spider computer programme visits websites to see what text is on each page. It then takes a copy of this information back to the search engine and stores it. Next time someone does a search if they use one of the words you have used on your website then you will be listed in the search results.
It is important to realise that when a spider is picking up your website it does this by picking up key phrases within the text – particularly the first page. It is vital that on this page you are clear about what you do. For example if you design websites you want to have phrases such as ‘website design’ mentioned. Be careful though – Google is onto the fact that website optimisation companies were repeating key phrases to improve the websites rankings and so if key phrases are mentioned more than once every twenty words Google may penalise you for this.
If you want to quickly check and see how your current website stacks up go to Google and type in your website address. What comes up will show you what Google has picked up about your business. If it has just picked up your website name rather than listing what you do then the front page of your website needs some attention. Click on ‘Google’s Cache’ and then ‘cached text only’ and you will see what Google sees when it tries to find your website.
But website ranking is not just about what you can physically see on your screen. Behind your website is a series of codes programmed in. These codes also determine how your website ranks. Go to www.w3.org and click on ‘html validator’. Type in your website address and then any errors in the programming of your website will come up. Any of these errors could prevent Google from scanning and indexing your website.
Another factor that determines how your website ranks in search engines is how much traffic it gets and how many other sites on the internet are linking to you (called link farming). To optimise your site is to make sure you have as many other websites as you can linking to your website.
With more and more websites launching each day, on going maintenance of your website and its optimisation is essential. Of course all of this is a little complicated for the lay person so this is where the services of good search engine optimisers may prove helpful.
