Basic Website Optimisation

.. It’s far better to have people finding you than for you to go looking! What do I mean by this? People are already searching by specific terms, (keywords). Your job is simply to position yourself (offer/website/squeeze page…) between the keyword typed in and the (SERPs) search engine results pages on the big 3! Google, Bing, Yahoo! … so when your keyword/phrase is entered the searcher arrives at the search page containing the link, You.com

To achieve this make your site as search engine friendly as possible...

Before optimising, spend some time researching to find the best keywords that describe your site or webpage (be specific for your offer don’t say shrub if you mean rose!)... You want your traffic to be as targeted as possible.

However, trying to get a good search position (Page 1-3) for a highly competitive keyword (such as make money online!) will be a complete waste of your time.... go for keywords in longer phrases, (so called long tailed).

Use of the Google keyword tool or other keyword research tools such as Market Samurai or Keyword Elite to look for great keywords/search terms that have a good global monthly search volume (I generally like around 10.000) but not too much competition ( in search results) this is a bit of an art, but well worth the time invested.

Ok, you have the keyword/s/phrases that best describe your offer and they meet the basic criteria as described. Next you will want to make it as easy as possible for the search engine spiders (programs that crawl the web collecting information to add to a search engine's index) to find you, and so index you (add you to the relevant SERPs) so you can be found by keyword search.

To do this simply look at the task from a spider point of view… give them as much information as possible, in a format they can read and understand… in its most simple form, this is the basis of SEO (search engine optimisation).

Website Optimisation

Put Your Main Keyword/s In The Title Tag.

A tag is simply a snippet of HTML code in the head section of a web page. The title tag describes your website - The text will be displayed in the blue bar at the very top of the browser window, also typically Google display the title tag as your title in the search results, making it perhaps the most important of the tags, do this for every page. Your Keyword title| Home Your Keyword title| About etc…

Put Your Main Keyword/s In The H1 Tag.

Have your keywords occur early in the tags. H tags are heading tags, used as main headings on pages for human readers as well as spiders and often used by search engines when determining ranking. (Basic Website Optimisation… as above, for example is an H1tag). The highest level and therefore most important heading is the H1tag, then H2, down to H6 being sub headings. You can use one or two H1 tags on a page; Website Optimisation (above) for example is another H1tag.

Put Your Main Keyword In The URL.

If possible have your keyword/phrase here...http//keywordindomain.com.

Have Your Keyword/s In The Page Content.

Your keywords and keyword phrases must appear in the page text to demonstrate your content is relevant and related to the tags. Search engines love relevancy, and will reward you - also keep your content fresh, updated and unique! Use keywords in the beginning of the document and aim for a keyword density of 3- 7% for main keywords and perhaps 1- 2% for the lesser ones. Check your site or pages online, Search, free keyword density tool.

Have Your Main Keyword/s As Anchor Text.

An anchor text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink that takes you from one page to another page or website. The URL is contained and actionable, but not seen. Most valued are anchor text from inbound links, i.e. links from other websites to your website using your main keyword/s. For example if I have a link to this page from a blog comment say, and that link is Website Optimisation, that is an anchor text and will be a viewed by spiders as a significant vote for the relevance of my page in relation to its main keyword/s… Search engines reward relevance!

Use Alt Tags For Images.

Spiders can’t read images and so don't attribute any benefits to you for using them, however, they do read their textual descriptions in the Alt tags, so if you have images on your pages, use the tag to add keywords as a description.

Meta Description Tag.

Use the meta tag to write the account of your site you want displayed under your title tag heading in the SERPs (search engine results pages). The keywords used in this description are less important in terms of page ranking, but are still useful in your overall website optimisation campaign as they form part of the site description and therefore form a visual trigger for the searcher. Think of this tag as an advert or call to action, much as with PPC (the paid for listing above and to the right in SERPs).

Meta Keyword Tag.

As with the Meta description tag, meta tags are counting less with Google, but are still important enough to include in your website optimisation as the keyword tag tells the search engines which keywords or phrases you’ve targeted - for that specific site or page. List only the keywords from the specific page. Get them from your title, meta description, headings and your first paragraph of content, in that order.

Have A Site Map.

A Sitemap as the name implies, is simply a map of the internal links/ pages that make up your website. Site maps are an important form of communication with search engines spiders and should not be ignored. If you are using a blogging platform there are site map plugins that are easily installed or you can download a free site map generator form Google.

This then is the basics of Website Optimisation. It's a broad subject, but I hope this article make it just a little more clear...

Have great success.

Brye.