| What
is Search Engine Optimisation/Marketing? |
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Search
Engine Optimisation (SEO) in simple terms is the art of
gaining top positions in the search
engines under terms related to your company in the main
results. How this is done is slightly more complicated. Back
in the early days of internet marketing, solely Meta Tags
were used to rank pages (HTML code containing your keywords,
which the search engines can see but not the user). If your
page had the keyword listed 1000 times in the meta tags and
your competitor 1001, they would be ranked above you.
Although
meta tags are still important, search engine technology has
come a long way since then (you can appreciate why) and so
has the art of SEO. But the first and most important rule
to remember is that search engines are not as clever
as you may think. They can only read the under-lying HTML
code to find out what your site is about. This means that
if your content is stored in images, Flash or Java etc the
search engines cannot see it. In some cases the spider can
get lost and confused in the non-HTML code and just ignore
the entire page or site. Dynamically-driven sites can also
have problems gaining good positions because search engines
tend to ignore URL's which have special symbols in, the most
important being '?'.
So
now we know that search engine positioning is about making
the spiders be able to see what our site is about, removing
any elements which can confuse them, how do we get top positions?
Each search engine has its own algorithm for ranking sites
but the concept is the same and we need to get the target
keywords in the different elements used in the scoring process.
The main elements are:
- The
<HEAD> tags - The only head tags to worry about
are the title, meta description and meta keywords. Put them
before any external JavaScript files and Cascading Style
Sheets, in the above order. Make sure that the most important
words are at the start. We recommend a maximum of 10 words
in the <title>, 40 in the <meta description>
and 20 in the <meta keywords>, Per Page.
- The
<body> content - Make sure that you have your
keywords listed in your text. Preferably have a heading
tag at the top <H1> - <H6> also containing the
keywords.
- The
Link text - Having your keywords in links
to other sections on your site is important.
- The
<alt> tag - With images, make use of the alternative
text tags. If you can't get away from using images (surely
not!) it is imperative that you add the keywords in the
alt tag.
Upon filling each element we need to match the different search
engine algorithms by adjusting the frequency and occurence
of the keywords. You don't want to abuse your keywords, keywords,
keywords, as the search engines frown upon this and it can
go against you. You also want to make sure that the weighting
is correct i.e. try not to have your keywords appear as frequently
at the bottom of the page. This is where our page-tweaking
experience and research has been and still is essential to
gaining first page results time and time again.
The
next and most important factor in achieving top search
engine placements is Link Popularity.
By building as many links to your site as you can from other
sites (preferably with related content), search engines place
a greater relevancy to your site, potentially making the difference
between page one results and a page 100!
Finally
it is time time to get listed in the search engines. The approach
we suggest will be different for each project becuase each
company/organisation will be in a different position. So why
don't you request your FREE
website report and we will advise you on how to best
spend your time and money? You've nothing to lose.
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