Flash, Jquery, Java, CMS, XHTML – all can make your site interesting, easy to use and combined with a great design, the best website this side of the 2Advanced website. However if nobody can find the site – all is for nothing. This is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is King.
SEO has taken on a life of its own and has now become the preeminent service any web developer can provide. With the major search engines creating more and more advanced algorithms to sift through the millions of user search requests, its becoming harder to get any website to rank high on the results page. However with a few simple tips, you can lift your site up through the ranking with little fuss.
Concise Keywords
Probably the most important part of SEO is selecting keywords that reflect the content on your website. The best way to do this is to build your keyword list from the content of your site once the site’s information has been written. This ensures your key words and key phrases remain consistent and highlight to the search algorithms the important information contained on your site. No more 20 keywords are required to give you the best results.
Location, location, location
One of the easiest ways to boost your search results is to ensure a location is indicated within the site’s content, meta data and title. With millions and millions of websites to search from, location is the one aspect that will significantly narrow the parameters down to the city or area your business is located. With your location clearly indicated on your site, you will show up highly in searches directly relating to your area.
Title/Meta Data/Content Consitency
These days search engines are sophisticated algorithms that are not easily fooled. In the early days you could fool them by adding popular keywords into your meta data to gain top search results despite your website having no relation to those keywords. These days search engines match page title to key words (meta data) to page content, and if they don’t match, you don’t rank. Its a simple but powerful concept that ensures search inputs find what the searcher seeks. Ensure these are consistent on your site and you’ll be amazed at the boost in your site’s rankings.
CSS Layouts
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) now form an integral part of the website developing process by ensuring site layouts remain friendly to search algorithms or what are sometimes called search bots. Search bots search text and image names and that’s about all. They are looking for information keywords and titles to add to their database of search terms. CSS layouts can disguise simple text in more visual ways allowing beautiful designs to hold no restrictions for search bots in information gathering. Older sites used tables or framesets for layouts, but these posed limitations in information gathering and particularly for framesets limitations for search bots finding all the pages located on your site. Stick to CSS layouts and help the search bots find their way easily around your website.
These are just a few of the simple steps you can employ to enhance your site’s rankings. There of course a multitude more that can be used but these basic tips are easy to implement and give instant results.
Zephyrmedia uses the latest SEO techniques on all website projects to ensure sites we develop feature high on search results. Is your website ranking high? If not contact us today.