Many web site designers still do not design the websites the build to work effectively for the search engines. This is a huge mistake. Why? Because they miss out on attracting lots of visitors to their client’s sites, visitors they can attract for free by designing a search engine friendly site that promotes high ‘organic’ listings. You may have spent a great deal of your marketing budget on your delightfully designed web, however you find your self needing to use pay-per-click advertising to attract visitors! This is because your website does not rank well enough organically, i.e. your sites search engine optimisation (SEO) does not promote your website well enough to display on the first pages of search engines.
We have put together some helpful tips on what you and your web design firm should be doing to help your sites SEO, tips you should be implementing from the start of your web project:
1. Keywords - Research highly targeted keywords. You should be before you ask your designer to create your website. Use a keyword research tool to research the most popular applicable to your industry. These keyword research tools will show how many people have searched for that particular keyword over the last 12 months. You should aim to create a list of around 100 keywords and phrases that you can include within your web pages.
2. Content – You should aim to create your web copy so that is keyword rich, i.e. you should include between 3 – 8 of your chosen keywords per 100 lines of text. Most importantly is to include a paragraph of up to 500 words of text for the top of each page within your site. This strategy is favoured among search engines and should help you in the log term aim for good, organic based SEO.
3. Meta tags – Optimisation of certain Meta tags within the code of your website can aid SEO, although not as much as it used to do. The most significant meta tags are the title and description and to a lesser extent, the keyword Meta tags. Include your keywords within each of these Meta tags. The title tag should be a short sentence of no more than 80 characters. The description should be no more than 150. Your keyword tag should include the most frequently used keywords contained within your web pages.
4. Heading Tags – These tags separate each section of your web page with headings and subheadings. You should include keyword phrases in these tags, in particular in the H1 – H3 tags as these are given most weight by search engines. You should also make a point of giving your websites images a title tag, this is achieved by using the alt image tag. In the alt image tag add a brief description of the image using some of your most important keywords, helping with SEO. The alt tag helps visitors to read the description if they can't see the image and allows screen readers to convey what the site is showing for the visually impaired.
5. Inbound links - web sites that link to yours raise your link popularity, especially those from ‘authority’ sites i.e. high ranking websites. Search for web sites that are compatible with yours and have a PR 4 or more.
6. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – your web designer should be using these. CSS helps to implement a clean design throughout your web site. CSS helps you to easily update your whole site by changing on or two elements in the CSS sheet. CSS also help you to create a XHTML valid website, favoured among search engines.
7. Place any script code into external files – if you use javascript for menus/linking it will create code between the header tags, pushing down the text that search, engines would spider first. Placing the script code in an external file reduces the code to just one line. The tips above will help you to develop a search engine friendly web site, but do not expect instant results. SEO is a long term marketing strategy that will, if carried out in the correct way, greatly benefit your websites chances of attracting targeted traffic.
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