Website Optimisation

Website optimisation is the first step in the SEO process. This involves ensuring everything on your website helps to indicate to the search engines what your website is about.

Once you’ve selected the right key words for your website it is usually best to structure the website around these key words. This can be done in several ways. You can attempt these methods yourself depending on your knowledge of web design or simply ask your webmaster …  When uploading pages and items to your domain, give them a name which is indicative of your key words. For example, instead of uploading an image as ‘img674′, call the image ‘Flower Arranging’ etcetera. Furthermore, if you use ALT Text tags for your images make sure the alternative text relates to your key words.

Key word text can also be used within your site navigation and within the side bars. For an example of this, we can look at www.Random-Gift.co.uk; the majority of the links at the top of the page contain ‘Gifts for’ which is clearly a targeted key word. One notable tip is to use key words within the anchor text of your links too. So rather than using ‘click here’ as your anchor text, you could be imaginative and write some derivative of your keyword.

The sections below outline the steps you could take to further optimise your website for SEO:

Content

In terms of SEO, it certainly is the case that content is King. Make sure your website is clear and coherent. Not only will badly written content dissuade visitors from returning but it can also negatively affect your rankings. Ensure your chosen key words are used naturally where needed, as pointlessly repeating yourself in an attempt to improve rankings could lead to you being penalised by Google and quite frankly, looks unprofessional. If you constantly update your site with useful and relevant information you will find your site naturally climbs the organic search listings as Google holds fresh content in higher regard.  For this purpose, it may be prudent to include a blog within your domain as you can edit and update content freely (see our Blog section).

Page Titles

Page titles give an immediate view of your site’s content to search engines and to visitors and so should be extremely concise and targeted. Use your strongest key words within this title but keep to a 70 character limit; this will ensure your full title appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Ideally these titles should offer a ‘call to action’ (‘buy here, learn how to… for example) which will promote a desired response from visitors.

Bad Example – Mary’s Easy Guide to arranging flowers and other horticultural advice
Good Example – Flower Arranging Help | Learn Simple Horticultural Advice Quickly

Meta Tags

Meta tags are small sections of coding placed within a webpage’s header tags which give information about the websites author, title, purpose etc. Adding details in the meta tags which are relevant to your content is useful but is no longer the quick-fix SEO tactic it used to be. If you are able to edit your Meta tags, or your webmaster can do this for you, make them succinct and relevant. The Meta title and Meta description should between them summarise your site entirely.

Website Structure

Make sure that your website has a clearly structured hierarchy. When your website has a strong structure you are ensuring that the search engines can crawl (the process of scanning your websites content) your website efficiently and accurately. This ensures that any new pages are indexed quickly and that no pages are missed out of the search.