Some Best Practice in Optimising your Web Site

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a term often bandied around in marketing conversations, but unfortunately is also a practice that can be accompanied with a lot of "smoke and mirrors" by practitioners.

Off site SEO, the process of using SEO techniques outside of your own web site, is a practice that does take expertise and time, or perhaps some investment in software that can automate the processes.  If you get to this stage, then it is time to talk to an expert.

But on-site SEO is something that you can do yourself (assuming your web site is built in a decent Content Management System), or certainly something that a good web developer would be doing as a part of the normal course of building and managing a web site.  If it is an area that confuses you, here are a few basics.

It is in the interests of a search engine to deliver relevant search results to the user, so they have developed systems that can deliver the most appropriate pages, and can see through anyone who is trying to beat the system (spamming).  So ensure your site is relevant to the searches you want to be found on :

1. Ensure your text includes the main key words and phrases that are relevant to your business, especially in the first sentence of the Home Page
2. Review your competitors' web sites to see what terms are important to them - you may learn something !
3. Make sure your meta data is relevant.  Meta data is the text that sits behind a web page that the search engine reads and sometimes uses to produce its search results
4. Meta Title should generally be no more than 65 characters long, otherwise some search engines may truncate it.  If longer, then keep the most important keywords to the front
5. Meta Description should be tailored to the individual page, so make it different for every page on the site
6. Meta Keywords - don't stuff too many in or repeat words.  Just keep them relevant
7. Search engines do not like duplicate content, so try to keep your web pages unique to you.  If you use the text in other places (eg 3rd party site listings) then alter the text you give to them
8. Check every image on your site, to make sure each one has an "alt tag" - the description that you see when you mouseover an image.  Again, make them relevant to the page content
9. H1 headings are looked for by search engines.  These are the text headings you would use at the top of a page.  So again, make them context relevant and include keywords, and make sure they are tagged as H1
10. Check every link on each page of your site, to make sure they all work.  Search engines don't like broken links
11. Are you using "seach engine friendly" URL's ?  The URL is the address of each page - if it uses a keyword or two that is relevent to the page then the search engines will like it better than if it is in code
12. Search for your site using key phrases and see not just where you appear, but also how you appear.  Then make the changes needed to make sure you look your best
13. Look at the stats.  Most web sites will have access to the server stats, or tools like Google Analytics are available free of charge.  Get an account set up and review the site performance, especially those pages (Home Page, Offers, Tariff pages) that will generate the most traffic
14. Action regular changes to the site content (news, events, offers etc are good for this) and include changes to the Home Page.  Search engines like it when content changes and they have a good reason to revisit and re-index your site

Your web site is certainly your most important marketing tool, so make sure it works its hardest for you.  If you can't make the changes yourself, then make sure your site developer does it for you.

These are very much the basic steps in SEO, but there is no point doing the complicated expensive bits if the basics are not in place first.

If you would like to talk to us about how we can help you develop or optimise your web site, then do Contact Us.