If you’re ready to consider SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), you’re in one of two boats – either you haven’t got a site yet, or you have one and you want to improve its performance. If it’s the former, then you have a chance to optimise during the design stage which gives you a little advantage.
First point to understand – a graphic designer is NOT a web designer. If you are using a graphic designer to build you a website, you need to set some expectations and give them some SEO suggestions. If you’re in a position where you are using an agency to design your web presence, they should be doing this already, but you’ll be paying a lot more money and likely won’t need this guide! Doesn’t hurt to check though does it?
Domain Name
Consider this – what will people be searching for on the internet at the time you want them to find you? If you google “marie lloyd photography” the first result returned will be www.marielloydphotography.co.uk. The most important part of your web presence is your domain name, so make sure it is relevant to what people are likely to have typed in to their search engine. If you are a Wrexham Wedding Photographer, then www.weddingphotographerwrexham.co.uk may be a good domain name for you. In most cases you will need to match it with your company name, but that’s not set in stone so think about it and see what is available. At a minimum, if you are a photography company, include photography in your domain name as this will help steer people your way.
Flash or HTML
Flash is not easily indexed by Google, but that is improving. HTML gives you much better optimisation capability if you are new to SEO. Silverlight is not great either, so if you can, have a site designed that is based on HTML and CSS. That’s not to say a flash site won’t outrank an HTML one, but your life is going to be easier in the early days if you have an HTML based site.
If you want to make your life really easy and don’t want to pay a huge amount of money, get a hosting package which includes a WordPress blog and pick one of the theme’s already available. You can customise these quite easily and they are a great start point for a site which will have good SEO capability. For a UK based host, I’d suggest EVO hosting who have great support, good pricing and superb performance (speed is also relevant to getting good SEO!). I’ll do a Blog specific post a little further down the line which will identify SEO techniques and benefits of WordPress.
Page Names
Next in order of importance after your domain name is the rest of the URL (that’s the full path to a page on your website). A URL will start with your domain name, then /pagename.html. Other page types than ‘html’ are possible, but we’re considering the ‘pagename’ part here. If your page names are page1.html, page2.php, page3.htm, etc how is Google going to get any idea of what your pages are about? It will, as there are other ways, but give yourself a helping hand and make sure your page names have keywords in them! So, weddings.htm, portraits.htm, weddinggallery.html, wrexhamwedding.php, are all sensible pagenames.
Page Titles and Descriptions
I’ll assume for now that you have FTP access to your website and have downloaded a copy to your local computer to work from. Filezilla is a great tool to do this. Simply open the HTML files in notepad to edit them. Make sure you have a backup!
Titles and descriptions are defined in the meta tags of your web pages. The title is the text that shows up in the title bar of the browser when someone is looking at the web page (look again at the example above and note the title section in the tags below).
Notice in my examples how I have used the | symbol to separate terms so as to keep the number of words to a minimum.
The description is the text you see in Google when your web page shows up in search results – the first 150 characters that is. Descriptions don’t directly affect your ranking, but are your brief chance to sell yourself and encourage ‘click throughs’. There are some exceptions to this rule, but remember if you do not specify a description, Google will choose some text from the page and it may not be the text you want to be seen in a search result. These two areas are also critical to reinforce what each web page is about, so ensure titles contain your keywords and descriptions are accurate and concise. Also, make sure your descriptions don’t just duplicate the title text.
There are two different pages in the above three pictures – the index page which is the front or home page for our site and our weddings.html page. Something to be careful of is having different Titles and Descriptions on every page of your site. This allows Google to know what each page is about and you may find it directs people to a specific page on your site, so do not fall in to the trap of using the same wording on every page.
Page Content
Search engines have automated spiders to scan your site. They consider keywords on your site in order to determine what it is about. They weight different words with different levels of importance. Titles and Descriptions are followed in order of importance by your Headings. A heading must be identified by a h1 tag and subsequent subheadings as h2, h3, etc. Again, ensure your keywords are in your headings.
Don’t assume that the spiders are not intelligent and can’t ‘read’ what you have written. Keyword stuffing may have been successful in the 90′s, but expect to get penalised for doing it these days. You need to write normally and in context, remembering to use your keywords but not so frequently it sounds unnatural. Certainly try to use them again in the first paragraph of text and some sources imply that adding a bold tag to a word also increases it’s relevance to some search engines. To prevent it sounding ‘spammy’, you should try to keep your keywords to around 2-3% (two or three in every one hundred words).
Most importantly, you need to write good quality content that people will want to read and that will draw people in to your site. Visitors who only visit a single page on your site will increase your bounce rate which makes Google think you are not so important and reduce your relevance in their eyes. Keep an eye on your bounce rate (covered in a future article) while trying to optimise your site at a later time.
Now a note to bring you crashing back down! Just doing this won’t get you to number one on Google. These are basic things which you need to get right in order to stand a chance, the next stage is most important. It is possible to have missed a fair bit of the above and still get a good ranking. However, if your competitors have not done the above you have an advantage when you catch up with them and that should help you overhaul them. ;o)
In the next part I’ll cover a couple more ‘on page’ factors, then how you should structure incoming links and how page rank is relevant, plus some useful tools to see how you are doing so far!