UPDATED: AUGUST 15, 2017 – ARTICLE: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

Search Engine Optimisation is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. Viewed individually, these changes might seem like small little improvements. But when combined with other optimisations, they could have a great impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results. Anything you do on your web page is called SEO.

SEO stands for “search engine optimisation”. You get on-page-seo and off-page-seo.

Our Search Engine Optimisation Tutorials will guide you through all the essential ingredients when designing your site. We say “search engine”, but you should base your optimisation decisions first and foremost on what’s best for your site visitors.

They’re the main consumers of your content, and are using search engines to find your website. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results.

Search engine optimisation is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to being found in search engines, your ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.

Your site may be smaller, or larger than our example site and offer vastly different content, but the optimisation topics we discuss should apply to sites of all sizes and types.

How Search Engine Optimisation works

Start by watching a Movie on SEO

Not sure how Search Engine Optimisation works take a few minutes to watch the below SEO Movie. It will give you a better understanding of what needs to be done on your site.

Search Engine Land worked with Common Craft to produce the video, and they have many more great videos like this in the Common Craft video library.

Search engines like Google have quite a job, from all the websites on the web they have to find the best results for the query that has been searched for.

How do they do that?

By asking questions.

What happens when you do a Web Search

In the above movie Matt Cutts explains what happens when you do a web search. When you do a search on Google you are not searching the web.

You are searching Googles index of the web. Or at least of much of it that Google can find. Google does this with software programs called spiders.

Spiders start by fetching a few web pages and follow those pages fetching more pages and follow those pages fetching more pages and so on until Google has millions of web pages stored on their computers.

When you do a web search these are the web pages that Google will use in its search query’s, returning the best result for the search query.

If your search engine optimisation is done correctly it could be your page that Google shows on page one of their search results.

How to Rank High on Google

Google has over 200 major ingredients it uses to rank a page if you get your SEO (search engine optimisation) right your page will be at the top of search results.

We know some of the things that search engines are looking for and by following these simple procedures we can improve our search engine optimisation or on-page-seo.

On-Page-SEO

Words are important, keep to the topic, content is King.

Words matter. Search engines account for every word on the web, this is why your content is king. Write good unique content and plenty of it, do not copy from other sites. Keep to the topic of the page. This way if you have a site about web design, when someone searches for web design search engines can narrow those results for websites that have words that relate to web design. Your page will compete with other sites about web design, and the site that has the best SEO will appear at the top of Google search results for the query web design.

Title tags are probably the most important tag on your page.

Title tags are important when it comes to search engine optimisation, each page on the web should have a page title, you can see the page title on search results. Search engines regard the title as important as its supposed to be a summary of the page. Like in a book shop if you looking for a certain book you ask for the book title that way the librarian can find it. Title tags should not be longer than 70 characters, and include the main keywords for the page first in the tag.

Description tags let visitors know what your page is about.

Description tags. Having a good description about the page with keywords will also tell search engines that those words are important words for that page. Visitors can also see your page description in search results, make sure its what the page is about and a good description of the content of the page its for, your description tag should not be longer than 160 characters.

Keyword tags although not used by Google still should be used.

Google does not use the keyword tag any more but its still a good idea to place you most important keywords first in the tag as other search engines still use the tag.

Navigation and Internal link Structure.

Make sure your site is easy to navigate and all your pages are no more than 3 clicks away from the home page. Place hyperlinks in the content to other pages on your site, use long tail keyword structured anchor text. This makes it easy for spiders and visitors to find content.

Each page should also have outbound links to quality sites with the same topic as the page. Try to have a least 4 out bound links on a page. Three should be no follow. The reason is that if visitors don’t find what they looking for on your page and return back to Google its bad for your search engine optimisation and bounce rate.

If this happens to many times Google will remove that page from those search results. By having similar sites, your visitor might click on those links and not back to Google. Outbound links to high ranking sites will improve your search engine optimisation.

Have a Site Search.

Include a site search bar on every page, visitors can then type search queries into the bar and find content on your site that relates to the query.

 
 
And don’t forget to mess around with keyword density sometimes less is more! Use a selection of long tail keywords, short tail keywords, and different keywords that relate to the main keyword of the page when you do your search engine optimisation.

Top Website Optimisation Tips

To help your site rank better follow these optimisation tips when when creating a website. If you get your search engine optimisation right you will have a busy site.

1. Domain Age

Register your domain for at least 5 years or more. You are sending a message to Google that you are here to stay. This is one of the 200 major ingredients it uses to rank a page. By registering your domain for a long period its one thing that’s easy to do and boosts your on-page-seo and search engine optimisation.

2. Website Speed

If you want to improve your search engine optimisation think of page speed. Build fast loading web pages, each page can rank on page one if its designed right and bring visitors to your site for the keyword its optimised for. Google likes fast websites. Make sure your site does not have code errors and not to many images on the pages. Some things that will slow your website down are:

• Incorrect Code errors or warnings
• Old Code
• Large image files
• Too many large images
• Too many CSS Files
• Don’t use Flash
• Don’t use Frames
• Do not use too many or try not to use any Nested Tables

3. Website Structure

Website structure and content are what you need to concentrate on, make sure you have all these bases covered:

• 404 Page – Or not Found Page is where a visitor will be redirected to if your site has a broken link, a page has been moved or a page has been deleted.
• Underscores – Never use underscores in your URLs always use hyphens.
• Blog – Once your site is set create a blog and post regularly on it, visitors can interact with the website posting comments, and fresh content always helps. Visitors can subscribe and will get notified by email of new blog posts, bring them back to your site. Blog News Items, New Products and Events Etc.
• Robot.txt file – tells Google and other search engines about pages on your site and how you want them to treat those pages.

Use Social Media

Place social media share buttons on your site, visitors will help share your content on social sites. Each time they share you get a good inbound link from one of the social networks, great for your search engine optimisation.

Inbound Links

Get good quality inbound links from highly ranked website (check with Pagerank), use a variation or your keywords, your url’s in those links. Vary using www., http//www. and /index in the urls you specify to be linked with, also use nofollow links. Again link from websites that have similar content.

Recommended Website To Visit For More On-Page SEO Tutorials

The Essential Guide To On Page Optimization

SEO: The Movie

Search engine optimisation is a lot of work, get it right and the sky is the limit.

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