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A beginners guide to search engine optimisation

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no search engine “specialist” (hey, I’m a web designer!), but all the sites I build are what you’d call “search engine ready” - in other words they’re built in a way that makes it easy for search engines to crawl your sites content and retrieve information for their listings.

The single most important factor for search engine optimisation (SEO) is your sites text copy. If you get it right it goes a long way to achieving some decent search results, but if you get it wrong things can backfire and your site will struggle to get visitors. Writing good web copy is an art but it’s not the same as writing for other media such as print.

Normally clients supply their own text copy, and for the most part what I receive is generally good, and with the occasional tweak looks acceptable. On some occasions though the supplied copy has been dire, and that’s being polite!

So without further ado, here’s a run down of the key points;

Before you start

Choose half a dozen or so key words or phrases that you want to target and make them the main focus in your content. You can’t expect to aim for every single variation of a word/phrase unless you have thousands of pages. Competition for popular words will be fierce so think outside the box a little, for me there’s a lot of competition for “web design” so I get a little more specific and go for “web design Northampton” which gets me some better results for “ web design...”.

Page Title

An example of the web browsers page title

See the words in the blue bar right at the top of your browser window? This is called the Page Title and is arguably the most important thing on the page. Not only does it tell the user what the page is about but it’s also used by search engines as the link text in search results. Any words or phrases you use here will usually reflect what the user has been searching for, and search engines tend to use this as a factor for deciding whether or not your page comes up in the search results.

There are many ways of presenting the Page Title, one popular format is “ page name | section name | site name “. There’s no right or wrong way of doing it but experimenting with different formats, key words and phrases can have a dramatic effect on search results.

Meta tags

The meta description is still used as the description in search engines results. This should be a brief description that summarises the page to a maximum of around 160 characters, and using as many key words as possible. Avoid the temptation just to write a list of words separated with commas.

The meta keywords tag is not widely used any more due to past abuse. The jury is still undecided as to whether you still need to use them, but don’t lose any sleep over it!

The page heading and sub headings

Often missed by a lot of web designers every page should use HTML headings and sub headings. Apart from giving the document some logical structure and helping people using assistive technologies to understand your page, search engines put a bit of extra weight on the text you put in them. For instance a title on this page is “A beginners guide to search engine optimisation” so the words “guide, search, engine, optimisation” give a clue to search engines as to the content on the page.

Using keywords in your copy

Keywords are not just for meta-tags, you should use them throughout your site. If you’re writing some copy for your web site a frequent distribution of a few well chosen words will add even more relevance. Take these examples:

“Our company is the number one provider in the area, we strive to offer the best possible service”
- this sentence makes sense but doesn’t contain any useful keywords.

“We offer web design services in Northampton, and customer satisfaction is important to us.
- this sentence contains the key words and phrases, “web design”, “ web design services”, “design services”, “web design + Northampton”, see the difference?

Using a search engine optimisation specialist

Good SEO doesn’t come cheap. The better companies who do things properly will charge you a high 3 figure, or four figure sum for the initial work but can give you some excellent results for your chosen keywords and phrases. If you have the budget hiring a good SEO company is an option if you think you can get a good return on your investment.

SEO charlatans

Beware there are a lot of SEO charlatans out there who use “black hat” techniques which may work for a while but can end up with your site being blacklisted by the big engines. Quite often they will offer seemingly amazing things for a low price, buyer beware - you get what you pay for. Here are some things to avoid:

• Hidden text - likely to get you blacklisted
• Keyword stuffing - risk of getting blacklisted, often they add a few paragraphs of text to your site, usually at the bottom of your home page that adds little or no value for your visitors
• Guaranteed no.1 spot on Google - no-one can guarantee this
• Submit your site to 1000 search engines - there are only 3 or 4 engines worth submitting to
• Submit to a gazillion link directories - often known as “link farms” and usually worthless

Use a good copywriter

If you can’t afford professional SEO services then using a good copywriter is the next best option. They will understand how to write good web site copy taking into account appropriate use of page headings and keywords. In fact many good SEO companies use copywriters anyway!