Search Engine Optimisation Tips

Introduction

Getting your small business website into search engines is critical if you're looking to get relevant visitors, and therefore potential customers, to your site.

So who are the major players in the search engine market? In order of importance:

• Google - the King of Search Engines.
• Yahoo!
• MSN Search
• The Others - Ask Jeeves, AOL Search and more.

The art / science of achieving prominent listings on search engine results pages (SERPS) is known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. SEO consists of a raft of techniques and methods to help bump up your site's standing within search engine directories.

In this article, I'll share with you a few SEO techniques that I've found to be useful.

PLEASE NOTE - Any search engine will automatically favour almost any site that has rich, useful, frequently updated content. All the techniques and optimisation in the world won't help an irrelevant or out of date page.

Tip #1 - Know Your Keywords

First and foremost, think about the words and phrases that are most relevant to your site. If you primarily sell broom handles, then you'll want the phrase 'broom handles' to appear pretty frequently on your site including in:

• the Page Title
• the KEYWORDS META tag
• the DESCRIPTION META tag
• and in the Page Content

There's much debate as to whether or not KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION META tags are used by search engines nowadays, but as long as they are relevant, they can't hurt.

Avoid the tendency to use business speak or jargon as your keywords. Remember that your keywords are not necessarily what you are selling, it's what your customers are searching for. So it's 'brooms' and not 'floor sweeping solutions', OK?

Tip #2 - Give Each Page a Unique Title & Descriptions

Unless each page on your site has a unique and description, there's a good chance that Google (and other engines) will think they are duplicates and omit them.

Notice how this page has a <title> tag very similar to its <h1> tag and very relevant to its content. Search engines like that a lot.

If nothing else, make sure the pages of your site have different titles.

Tip #3 - Watch Your Filenames

If your HTML, images and other files have names reflecting their content and the keywords of your site, you have another opportunity to show search engines just how relevant your page is to a particular search term.

This page is named exactly as its <title> tag, using underscores (_) as separators. This helps search engines to pick out the keywords in the filename, further increasing its relevancy.

Avoid calling images 'logo.gif' or 'photo.jpg'... give them proper names and include keywords where appropriate.

Tip #4 - Get a Sitemap

A properly constructed and frequently updated sitemap lets a search engine know the location of every page in your site, all in one simple list.

Make sure your sitemap is linked directly from the homepage or index page of your site. That way, every page is only two links away from the first page that a search engine Bot (or Spider) will see, increasing the speed and likelihood of inclusion in their directory.

Tip #5 - Valid (X)HTML Does Make a Difference

Another area of hot debate is whether search engines are interested in the validity of (X)HTML in their ranking algorithms. In my experience, they are...pages with valid markup are indexing more quickly and more effectively than those with errors.

Since there are so many other benefits to having pages that validate, the SEO benefit is just another layer of icing on the cake.

Use W3C's online markup validator to check out your pages.

Useful Links

• W3C Markup Validation Service
• John Colascione on Website Marketing

Steve Hollis
31st August 2005
http://www.dogfoodmedia.co.uk

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