Search Engine Optimisation

Article written for Business Link last year.

Making a query on a crawler-based search engine will often turn up millions of matching pages. Type wine into Google and you will get references to over 9 million pages.

Most users will find what they want on the first page, so the challenge is to ensure that your site appears within the first 10 results.

Choose your keywords with care

Put yourself in the place of one of your potential customers. What will they type into a search engine if they are looking for your products or services? These are your keywords.

If your site is advertising your services as a public relations consultancy, then public relations consultancy should be three of your key words.

The key words on each page of your web site need to reflect the content of that page, so if you have a page that details the business sectors you work in, the keywords should reflect that. Public relations consultancy travel might be the keywords on that page if you work exclusively within the travel industry.

Don't be over ambitious. Typing in "public relations" to the UK pages of Google produces over 150,000 pages. "Public relations consultancy" nearly 4000, but "public relations consultancy Kent" produces only one sponsored link. The obvious point is that the careful selection of a group of keywords can result in a high ranking.

Place keywords near the top of the page

Your keywords must appear within the page title. "Welcome to My Company" as a page title is of little use, but "My Company, public relations consultancy Kent", will help ensure you get relevant placement in search engines.
Search engines place a high emphasis on keywords that appear near the top of a page. If possible, use your target keywords in the page headline. Having "My Company is a Public Relations Consultancy in Kent" as a page header, in addition to incorporating this text within the main body of page content, will greatly facilitate search engine placement.

Include relevant content

Even several years ago, just repeating a long list of keywords at the bottom of a page would result in a high placement in some search engines. Not any more. Search engines have grown more "intelligent" over the years and can now spot this type of "spamming". Almost all will not list your site if they detect this.
What many search engines will look for is page content that is relevant to the title of your site, hence the importance of having unique page titles for each page that reflect the content of that page.

Avoid links that use graphics

Using graphical "buttons" to link between the pages in your site may look attractive from a design point of view, but some search engines cannot follow these links and won't be able to index the content of your site.

This problem can be solved by adding HTML links at the bottom of the home page that link to the subsequent pages. Search engines will find them and follow them.

In addition, avoid the use of graphics to display key words. Some search engines will index images through the use of comments or ALT tags associated with the image, but the best solution is to have keywords as HTML.

Avoid the use of frames

A web "page" that uses frames is essentially divided up into several pages and many major search engines cannot follow the links within these framed pages. For this, as well as usability issues concerning the use of frames, designers now tend to avoid their use.

Have relevant Meta tags

Meta tags are hidden code that is contained within your web site. In using these, it is important that they reflect your page titles and content.
Many search engines do not use meta tags to rank your site, but some do, and it is important that this code is added to each page.

Build links

An apparent solution to getting ranked high in a search engine, would be to find the site that appears top in your business sector and then copy the keywords, meta tags and content onto your own site. Aside from this clearing being illegal, this is not likely to work.

All of the major search engines now use link analysis to help in the ranking process. So it may well be that the site that is ranked highest for your search terms, also has many relevant sites linking into it.

Essentially, the more sites you have got linking into your site, the higher the ranking you are likely to get. However, it is not just an issue of getting links from any site that will list you, but rather getting linked from sites that are related to the topics you want to be found for. Getting your link added to a local village web site will have much less value than getting listed on your professional associations web site.

Submitting to search engines

When you submit to a search engine, you need not add every page. Submitting the top 3 or 4 pages will be sufficient, as most search engines will follow the links from each page to index the content.
It is not wise to use automated programs for the submission process. Although some automated routines are good, getting listed in the major search engines is important. There are not that many major search engines and using their 'add url' facility will not take long.

Once submitted, be prepared to wait. Search engines such a Google may not get around to indexing your site for up to 4 weeks and even then not all of your pages may be listed.

Don't 'spam' the search engines by making frequent repeated submissions. Most will spot this and you may even find your site removed from a listing if you repeatedly submit.

Keep updating your content

When you update your content, resubmit your site. Sites with regularly updated content are likely to get a higher ranking in some search engines, in addition some search engines are intelligent enough to detect static sites whose content does not change. These may therefore only get visited by the search engines once or twice a year.