DIY Search Engine Tips through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
This article is intended to provide guidance on how to set up websites to get good rankings in the search engines if you want to go the DIY route.
The best results come from knowing your business, monitoring your competitors and from regularly refining your web site pages. Epsilis are pleased to assist in this process if required however the recurring nature of the process may mean that some clients will feel they get better value for money if they take responsibility for their own search engine marketing efforts. This article is intended to assist clients in understanding the issues.
1. The basic facts:
The competition
- If you are selling the same thing as many others you need to stand out from the crowd - in web terms the potential competition is everyone in the world doing what you do with a web site and standing out from the crowd means coming up on the first page (first 10 places) of a search. If your business is reasonably unique this will be easy, otherwise it may not be realistic to expect to get a top ranking unless you pay to get one
'.. listed on 500 plus search engines...'
- If you have a web site you have probably had dozens of emails offering to get you listed on many search engines. There are only a handful of widely used search engines - there are thousands of directory type lists of web sites attempting to fill a perceived need. Most are unlikely to have any real impact on most sites. These services are automated - in that a standard set of data is sent to each of a long list of search engines (or directory sites). Automation is ok for the directory sites but this doesn't work for the important search engines. The most effective method is having a link to your site from a website already well known to the search engines.
Results don't always come quickly
- Typically search engines work on a monthly cycle so your website is unlikely to get listed quickly. It can take between 6 months and a year for new websites to be properly ranked on the search engines.
Things change
- All your competitors with a web site may be trying to improve their search engine ranking. To become successful and remain successful is likely to be an ongoing task
2. Prepare your website
Rule number one
- The website content must be useful otherwise it is not going to work no matter how effective your search engine listing is
For Keywords think Keyword Phrases
- Don't think of keywords as single words. People seldom type a single word into a search engine because this returns too many irrelevant results. Therefore make a list of short phrases that people might type in that are relevant to your website
- Try out your phrases in the search engines to evaluate the websites that currently come up - are they relevant to your website or are a lot of irrelevant sites found. If people put in a search and a lot of irrelevant sites come up they are not likely to use those search results. If the results are relevant you are on the right lines
- You can see what keyphrases your competitors are using the keyword density analyser at http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm
- Geography - is location important, if it is make sure it is in your Keyword Phrases
- Think about the different pages on your web site - each page ideally should have it's own set of Keyword Phrases that are relevant to the content on that page
Meta data tags
These are hidden html tags on each web page. They help to get a good ranking on search engines. The page Title Tag (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag can get displayed on search results.
The page Title Tag
- Your most important keyword Phrases should be in the Title Tag. The first sentence of your Title Tag should be "human readable" (as the first few words are displayed in the browser title bar), the rest can be just a list of keyword phrases.
- Keep the Title Tag relatively short say under 20 words
The Meta Description Tag
- A short description of the web-page. (You can edit the one from the Title Tag to make it human readable.)
The Meta Keywords tag
- Still used widely on websites but generally ignored by the search engines
The page content
- The first paragraph of your page should expand upon your meta tags. Repeat your keyword phrases but in human readable form
- Expand all your text references on a web page to match the keyphrases. In normal text editing you have probably mentioned the full phrase once then dropped words. The search engine only sees a phrase that partially matches so ranks your page lower. Eg Web Designers may get shortened to Designers on subsequent references.
- You don't want your keyphrases to appear too many times, because that might make the search engines think your page is a spam page.
3. Build Links
Search engines analyse links to your website from other sites as means of determining if your site is good for the topic in question. Link analysis is not all about numbers although popularity is good, links from good sites are better (in the eyes of the crawler - ie sites the crawler ranks highly)
See our feature on Link Popularity and Link Building Suggestions
4. Verify And Maintain Your Listing
- Check on your pages and ensure they get listed
- Once your pages are listed, monitor your listing regularly
- Review site stats reports to see how you are performing
5. Update Your Website
- Search Engines like to see websites change so change your site regularly and build up your content.
We also recommend you visit Search Engine Success to find out a little more!
Good Luck!
Michael Spencer
michael@epsilis.co.uk
Epsilis - Website Designers
47 Farthing Drive
Letchworth Garden City
Hertfordshire (Herts)
SG6 2TR
UK
