Ignition - Inspired Thinking
Simple Search Engine Optimisation
July 3, 2008 at 1:35 pm | In Search Engine Optimisation
Over the last couple of years there has been a massive growth in the use of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques and it’s easy to get confused about what is good practice.
In essence, Google ranks web pages based on two things: relevance and popularity. A page is relevant to a search term if that term shows up in the title and body of the page and a page is popular if plenty of other websites link to it. It’s crucial that the text on your site includes the words and phrases that best describe your web pages but they also need to be words that people currently search with. They are useless if the average person won’t enter them into Google.
So make a list of what you think are your keywords for each page of your site, then type this web address into your browser https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - you’ll be able to check with Google what actual words and phrases people are searching on. Additionally search engines have decided that if other sites are linking to your site, it must be a winner; therefore, it deserves a boost in rankings. There are two main types of links that work best to increase your link popularity: links from other sites that focus on the same keyword phrases your site focuses on, and links from relevant categories industry-specific portals.
Here are some other basic things you can do to help your site move up the rankings.
1. Find out how well you rank online.
Go to www.alexa.com, which will tell you what position your website holds against all others. The goal will be to make that number lower.
2. Submit your site to search engines.
Do it personally; avoid “submission services” or software. You only need to do it once. Google’s site submission page is at: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl.
3. Place relevant keywords in the title tag
The title tag is the text that appears at the top of the browser when a webpage loads and it tells the search engine what your page is about. Don’t use too many keywords, or make it too long. And always ensure the title tag text appears in the body of the page.
4. Avoid relationships with link farms
Links are important but don’t ever pay money for a link from another site. Google is cracking down on this link farm activity and it could demote your website position if it thinks you’ve been trying to artificially boost your rankings.
5. Use alt tags on images
Alt tags “tell” search engine what your images are. This will help them index your pictures and better serve readers with text-only web browsers.
6. Build a site map.
A site map helps spiders crawl pages more quickly. Google loves sites that have site maps.
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