Search Engine Optimisation Advice

Most existing websites of 12 months or more can benefit from a range of quick changes to improve their search engine visibility and crawl ability. Here are my top website seo tips to make a quick impact on your existing rankings.

1) Keyword research – first things first, review the content of your key pages (homepage, main subpages etc) and make sure that your chosen keywords are actually being searched for. If you discover that this is not the case then do some additional research into what is being searched for.

2) XHTML validity – is your XHTML W3C compliant? Make sure all those images have alternate text tags and all other XHTML elements comply with the document type you have specified in your page header.  If not then you are running the risk of the search engines not interpreting your code correctly, errors and broken links will only lead to search engine spiders leaving your site.

3) XHTML Tags – make sure that you are using the correct XHTML tags to highlight the importance of your keywords. Google and the other search engines look at certain HTML elements more favourably.

4) Meta Tags – meta tags play an important part for both search engines and users, the meta title and keywords tags are good guidelines for the search engines to use as to what a page is about, but also the meta title and description tags are very powerful tools that can be used to make your site stand out in the search engine listings and entice the user to click through.

5) Content – make sure that the pages you are targeting to rank well have enough content. As the old adage goes, “Content is King”. You want to aim for at least 300 words per page that make sense to your reader but also carry the theme of the page well so the search engines have no doubt what the page is about. This is not always easy to accomplish but remember, when in doubt write for your audience, not the search engines, after all you want your readers to become customers.