Search engine optimisation: tips on how to get your web site working for you

Search engine promotion and optimisation to top the search engines


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Here comes the science bit! There are ten top tips you must consider for search engine optimisation:

1. Domain names containing your keywords will give you an advantage. Sometimes an alternative domain name as well as your main one is a good idea, for example B and Q own www.diy.com.

2. Page Titles are the most important part of the web site to attract search engines, because they are the first place search engines look for your keywords and that is what the search engine displays for your listing. Your most important keywords must go in here.

3. Use keywords in the first paragraph on the page. The next place a search engine looks for your keywords is the first paragraph on the page. Here you must place your most important keywords, along with as many others you can squeeze in before it stops reading well.

4. Link all your sub pages from your home page. Search engine spiders give more relevancy to pages linked from the home page, and some only go one level deep from the home page.

5. Use text links containing keywords to link to your other pages on the site.

6. Give images names. Search engines can't read the text displayed in an image, but they can read the alternative you give them, so make sure your ALT="good keywords" is included in the IMG tag. The ALT text is displayed in most browsers when you hover over the image.

7. Meta Tags are non-displayed pieces of information that describe your page to search engines. You should always use a Meta Description tag as this if often shown in search engine results to describe your page, and make it as compelling as possible. Meta Keywords tags are given less importance by search engines (as they have been abused in the past) but it's a good place to put misspellings of your keywords.

8. Make every page work as hard as the home page. Every page can be listed in search engines and be a gateway to your web site. Apply all these rules to all your pages!

9. Get lots of incoming links. As well as scoring your site according to what it sees on the page, Google also scores your site according to the number of links going to your site. Its rationale being if lots of people link to you, you must have a good site.

You can get incoming links to your site by:

registering with directory sites like www.dmoz.org
registering with relevant portals
having an affiliate scheme
putting reciprocal links on your site (you scratch my back I'll scratch yours)

50 incoming links is a good goal. You can find this out in Google by typing 'link: your domain name' in the search box.

10. Use a good, reliable web hosting company. If your site is down the day the Google spider comes to visit, you might have to wait another 30 days for it to come back.

Getting a top search engine position is only half the battle. Once you get a visitor to your web site it must still load fast, looks good and give them a compelling reason not to click the back button.

If you can reverse engineer a site so that it matches the words and phrases people are actually looking for then you have an advantage. We use the Overture search term suggestion tool.

In general the more people linking to your site the better. And if they are a popular highly ranked site and they link to you with your keywords in the link, then even better.