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Search Engine Optimisation

Introduction

This 'how to' guide should give both webmasters and marketeers a good understanding of what they need to do to get WebPages higher in the top search engines.

Content

Quite obviously, the most important thing you can do to get good placements in search engines is to have good content. What web site owners must keep thinking is, why do people use search engines? The answer is simple – because they search through the web and find the most relevant content that matches their search criteria. Now, if a search engine thinks your content is good then you have a much better chance of getting that number one spot.

If you've already got the content, then great! Read on to find out how to give your search engine positions a boost!

Semantic mark-up

By using XHTML and CSS you can separate style from content and structural mark-up. This enables WebCrawler's (search engine bots, such as GoogleBOT) to efficiently navigate your site.

If you haven't already heard of XHTML then check out last months how to guide which was an introduction to XHTML.

So what are the benefits of semantic mark-up vs non-semantic mark-up?

Firstly, it could reduce your page size by up to 75% which will increase your actual content to code ratio which is after all what the search engines want, content!

By using semantic mark-up you can also let the search engine know how much importance you want to be given to certain phrases or words.

The importance of heading tags

Take the following 2 examples

  <p><font  size=3 color="White" title="Search engine optimisation for 
  beginners">Search engine optimisation for  beginners</font></p>


  <h1  title="Search engine optimisation for beginners">Search engine 
  optimisation for beginners</h1>

Now which one will a search engine rank most highly? The second one of course! Search engines do quite a good job when it comes down to it. If you use any of the following tags in your page, it is like telling the search engine that the text between them is of high importance

  <h1>,  <h2>, <h3>, <strong>

If you use these tags with the most important headings of the page in <h1> and then <h2> and then <h3> with important general text in <strong>

Title and alt tags

Whilst you continue to use semantic mark-up with heading tags and a CSS based layout without tables you must remember to include some vital attributes to certain tags. If its got a title tag, use it! For every image on the page give it an alt tag with meaningful text describe the image fully. For example you would write and image tag like this

<img src="logo.jpg" alt="logo for company name here" 
title="company name here" style="height:100px; 
width:100px;" />

Your links should look something like this

<p>Why not come over and buy some <a href="www.linktotshirts.com" 
	title="High quality t-shirts at www.linktotshirts.com">High 
	quality t-shirts</a> from me</p>

Notice I have put the link in a paragraph tag surrounded by a sentence. By using "High quality t-shirts" as the anchor text for this link, search engines are going to regard this link higher than a link with the anchor text of "click here" as long as the page your linking to is relevant to high quality t-shirts that is. This is described in more detail below.

Relevant text

Possibly the single most important thing on your page is the content itself and the way that it is written. Making sure that your content is clear and precise including all of your keywords is vital.

Once you have written up all your content and coded into a nice semantic page you can check for a few things.

  • Your most important keywords appear in heading tags
  • All of your links are descriptive and include relevant text surrounding the

For example:

  • 'For more information on package holidays click here'

Will not be ranked as important to a search engine as

  • 'More information on package holidays'

The text on the page being linked to should also be relevant to the text and the link.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds help websites effectively distribute their content via an XML based feed.

Now that you have an RSS feed and have successfully included within you site you can add your RSS feed to yahoo. At the time of writing this article Google do not have a means of submitting your RSS feed, although they should pick it up in good time.

Inbound links

Search engines (especially Google) look at how many inbound links you have. The more inbound links you have, the higher your page should rank, although a few factors may affect this. The sites will have more of a benefit to you if they are sites similar to yours and are using relevant anchor text (as explained above).

Google uses an algorithm called Page rank. Page rank is Gogles method of ranking sites. The higher your page rank is, the higher your pages should rank for your keywords. Page rank works on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest. You can see your sites page rank with the Google toolbar for IE users, or for FireFox users there's an extension available.

Search Engine Submission

Now that your site is nicely optimised for the search engines, its time to start submitting your URL to them. I strongly suggest that you do this process by hand, and do not use automated software packages, as some search engines will penalise your site for this.
Here a few sites and directories that it is worth taking the time to submit your site to.

Directory Submission

Now that you've submitted your site to the top search engines, it's worth submitting them into the directories which search engines also use to find new sites. Some of the top directories include.