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Basic website optimisation

Creating a well optimised Web page can be a daunting task, but there are a number of basic tasks you can perform that will greatly improve your chances of being found in the search engines. To make the required changes you'll need to be able to edit the actual page code, or at least be using a management system that let you edit the required areas.

Page title tag

One of the most important parts of your page to get right is the HTML title tag. This controls the text you see in the title bar of your browser but is also used as the title and link to your webpage on the search engine results pages. Any words you put into your page title are deemed to be very important to your page by the search engines. You need to make sure that any relevant key phrases for each individual page appear in that page's title tag.

When you are writing a title tag for a page you need to consider a number of factors.

Words at the start of the tag are more important than those at the end
your tag must make sense as the search engines will display this to people on the search engine results pages
don't make your tag more than about 30 to 40 words or it could be seen as spam
remember only the first 10 to 25 words will be seen on a search engine results page

By carefully choosing your wording and making sure each title tag is specific to each individual page you will greatly improve the optimisation of your website.

Keywords and description meta tags

It's worth making a note here about these Meta tags. Many people place high importance on these tags when they optimise a page. In reality they have a negligible effect on how well your page is ranked, it's just they are a very easy way to be seen to be doing work on the website. The keywords tag is basically ignored by search engines as it was very badly abused by people trying to fool the search engines so they were listed for a various topics. The description tag is worth spending some time writing, not to improve your search engine ranking but to improve your pages display when listed on a search engine results page. If you work some of your key phrases into your description tag there is a good chance that the search engine is will use this to describe your page when they list you. This gives you a chance to encourage people to click on your link.

Text on the page

The actual words on your page are used by the search engines to work out what your page is about. Certain parts of your page given the higher importance than others. If you put a heading tag (<h1>) around a piece of text the search engine is will assume these words are important for the page. Similarly bold text and itallic text are seen as slightly more important. If you highlight you are important phrases on the page in this way you can increase its relevance when people search.

The most basic optimisation also falls into this category. If you want to be found for a certain phrase you must use that phrase on your webpage at least a couple of times. People talk about an ideal keyword density (the number of times you use a phrase compared to the number of words on the page) but there isn't any magic number. If you read through your text and it sounds like you're using the same words over and over again you've gone too far. Always remember that a potential customer is going to read your text and you need them to be impressed just as much as the search engines.

Links between your pages

The words you use to link from one page to another (called anchor text) is also very important. The text that the person is able to click basically tells of the search engine watch on the next page is going to be about. It's a very common to see hyperlinks like ' click here for Green widgets' where the words 'click here' are the hyperlink. By making the words ' Green widgets' the clickable text you are telling the search engines that the next page is about Green widgets rather than about clicking here.

Links from other sites

Getting links from other sites to your website is an incredibly powerful way to improve your rankings. Use forums, blogs, Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else you can put a link that goes directly to your website. If possible make sure you use key phrases as the anchor text (see above) and make sure you spread your links to different pages in your website rather than all going to your home page.

The techniques with covered above of the basic ones used in search engine optimisation. Whatever level you are working at you need to get these ones right first. Hopefully you've seen that they don't involve much technical knowledge, you only need to be able to change the text within the page rather than the actual page code. If you do spend some time and effort on these areas you will see an improvement in your search engine rankings and consequently the number of people visiting your website.

Make sure you have a look through more of the articles on this site for more hints and tips on making a success on the web.

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