Search Engine Optimisation

There are whole companies devoted just to Search Engine Optimisation. Basically apart from a couple of the major players it’s a huge con. There are certain things any website owner can do in just a few hours that will ensure that your website comes as high up most of the search engines (including google) as it can, given the nature of the competition. You can take many of these measures for yourself but some are integral to site construction or require an additional module installed and configured within the Content Management System of a website. For a modest fee I can take many of the following steps in order to give your site a good, fighting chance of rising up the ranks of the search engines. Others are down to the website owner to ensure.

Main factors affecting search engine placement:

• URL (the web address) – sensible and meaningful web address help a lot
• Length of time the site has been active
• Well written, semantic code that complies with the W3C web standards for accessibility. Don't use tables or frames to lay out your site either, they are heavily penalised by all the major search engines.
• Number of links from other sites to the site. The bigger the site you are linked from, the better. Registration of the website with trade and business directories helps in this regard.
• Well written, up to date and regularly refreshed content. This is the sole reason some people include a blog on their site.
• Speed of website (this only becomes a factor when the speed drops very low – within the bottom 5% of website speeds).
• Metatags and descriptions. These are bits of code inside the markup that you don’t see but search engines do when they crawl your site. They can contain keywords and search terms. Abuse of this system can get you blacklisted by search engines. Metatags are less of a factor in search engine placement than they used to be because many people include them now. However, having them there as opposed to not having them helps you compete with everyone else who has them. Having tags and descriptions that apply individually to the page they are on rather than generic tags for the whole site also helps.
• Google analytics. Having google analytics (or similar package) installed on your site means you can examine people’s entry and exit points, how long they spend in certain areas and which pages and features have been popular. You can then play to this information in the layout, design and content of your site to make it more attractive and easier for people to use. This, in turn, increases visitors and the time they spend on your site.
• Keywords. If you are combining your website with an advertising package such as the incredibly popular google adwords, you will have to choose keywords that people use to arrive at your site. Finding out which of these keywords were the most successful gives you information about what people searched for and clicked on to arrive at your site. Again, you can then play to this to increase throughput of visitors. It is possible to combine this keyword analysis with google analytics if you have it installed. This gives you an awesome amount of feedback.
• Having a sitemap is a very good idea – both for visitors to your site (although this has become less important as site search has become more sophisticated over the years) and for when you submit your site to search engines directly.
• Search engine submission. Search engines will eventually find your site, particularly if it is linked to from other, large sites. However, you can give them a head-start and let them know about the priority of pages, by submitting a correctly configured XML site map to them by hand. If you have a content management system this process can also be automated to happen once per week or similar. It can also be triggered by the addition of new content. You mustn’t submit your site too often or it will be blacklisted for abuse of the system, so this is a fine balance to strike.
• Alternative and social media. Google a popular search term. You'll see that the top entries are probably youtube videos or google maps. Do you have a video for your site? If not then grab a youtube account and put some related videos on it quickly! Grab those Facebook and Twitter usernames and get as many people to link to them as possible. Make sure your business is marked on google maps. Basically, the more people talk about you and the more places you can represent yourself on the social web, the greater the chance of rising up those search engine ranking. If nothing else grab the usernames and account names so nobody else puts something under your intellectual property that doesn't help you.