Web Design SEO Tips

Today I'm going to go over a few of the simpler things you to do in terms of SEO for your site. It is a common misconception that Search Engine Optimsiation is some sort of vudu art that only a select group of people can do, and that it's incredibly hard. However, as long as you are prepared to dedicate a little time to your website, you will find that your 10-20 minutes a night will quickly pay off.

Before I go into the external optimisation methods/techniques, I'm going to start with that oh-so-annoying phrase - 'Content is King'. I'm sorry to say it, as writing pages and pages of fresh content can be an extremely time-consuming process, but it will pay off. I'm not saying that you need to write a novel on every website you create, and in most cases you can get away with just a few pages so long as you competition isn't fierce, but you will drastically improve your relationship with google if you can manage to regularly pump out new content to your site. The easiest way to do this is to create a blog. Whilst you can do this by creating a blog on blogger or blogspot and linking back to your site at the end of each one, it's a much better idea to create a blog on your own site. There are plenty of other tutorials on how to set up a wordpress blog, so I won't go into it now, but if anyone wants to ask me personally feel free to leave me a question :).

Right, now onto some actual SEO.

1. The <title> tags. Don't forget to use them! They are a very simple way of getting in that particular page's keywords, and they take about 20 seconds to add to a page. Keep them short though, don't fill your title with keyword-keyword-keyword etc., and make sure they contain a little bit of description letting the user know what that page is about. They'll appear in your search engine results, so make sure they are relevant and accurate.
2. <meta> tags. Although their worth as a way of getting higher up the rankings has significantly decreased over the years, they are still extremely useful for search engines. It means that your description in a search engine is the one that you want to appear, as supposed to 3 lines from your footer that google picks for you.
3. KEYWORDS! It's no good optimising the content on your page for Maccaroni Cheese if you website is about door handles! Make sure that the content on your page contains a decent amount of keywords in it, but not too many. Write your content with the visitor in mind, and add keywords, not the other way around. You can increase the importance of keywords on your page by using them in the headers (<h1><h2><h3> etc.), or by putting them in <strong> tags. Again don't over do it, but a trickle here and there is perfect.
   
4. It's very very very important to do some research on your keywords too. There are some very useful tools out there for doing this, so use them! Google's keyword tool is the obvious one, but there are others, such as Market Samurai. Pick a keyword that has a reasonable amount of traffic per day, but be realistic. If you don't have the time to build up 30,000 links, don't pick a search term with that kind of competition.
5. Navigation. Many people worry far too much about external links (backlinks), and forget about internal links. Before you begin to create your site, draw up a navigation plan, and work out how the navigation on your site is going to work. It's normally best to have 5-6 subsections, each with 3-4 pages in each. Then, at the bottom of your page, you want links to pages such as about, contact, terms of service, privacy etc. If you have image rollovers instead of text as your navigation, make sure that you have text links too! Google won't follow images, so you need to have text links in there too. It's good practice anyway, as there will always be those people who have images turned off in there browsers. A good navigation system will lead to Search Engines successfully indexing ALL of the pages on your site, which is definitely something you want.
   
6. Avoid spelling mistakes. Get somebody to proof read your site before it goes live. They may spot something you didn't. If google doesn't notice your spelling mistakes, a potential customer might, and that won't look too good.
7. Get rid of unnecessary code by using external stylesheets, therefore avoiding any chances of Search Engines looking at the wrong code.
8. Construct your pages semantically - start with the title, then the navigation, then the content, and finally the footer. Use the heading tags effectively throughout the content. Use H1 for the important titles, then H2 for subtitles, and H3 for side headings etc. As long as you stick to that pattern, careful headings can produce fantastic results. It's a very good idea to include your keyword in your H1 tags.
   
9. Optimise each page on your site for a different keyword/keyphrase, and only use one phrase per page.

Once you've built a search engine friendly site, it's time to get yourself indexed, i.e in the Search Engine's list of websites to search.

To do this, you need to get a link to your site from a that Google visits regularly, such as hubpages, facebook, or a blog. Write an article, and include your link on there somewhere, and after a while, you'll notice you'll come up in google if you type in www.yoursite.co.uk! If you have an effective navigation system, all of the pages on your site should get indexed too. Don't expect to get indexed write away. It normally takes anywhere between a few days to a few weeks to get indexed. It's a painful process, but it needs to be done!

Okay, great, now you're indexed you can start to get yourself higher up the rankings on a term that will bring useful traffic to your site. Apart from all the things I've outlined above, you need to start link-building. If you search around on the internet, there's lots of useful guides for building up useful links to your site, so I won't bother covering them here. Check how you're doing in terms of links on Backlink Finder.

For a full, comprehensive list of link-building tacticts, I highly rate this page. If you don't have time to read all of that, articles are a very good way of building reputation and links. There's a chance people who like it will share it, and that means your number of links goes up. Google is very fond of blogs as well. Comment on other people's blogs and leave a comment, but a useful, relevant one, not just 'me too'.

Okay, that should be enough to keep you going for now. I hope some of what I've said has been of help to you. If you have any questions feel free to ask me either on here or on my website.

Thanks,

Matt Lewsley - Glendelm Web Design Cambridgeshire