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Tutorials > Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) > Basic SEO - Search Engine Optimise your site to get listed on Google

Basic SEO - Search Engine Optimise your site to get listed on Google

Getting listed and optimising your site for search engines takes time and effort. Your existing site my not be adequete and may not be able to handle some of our suggestions. Please note that this document will not guarantee a top placement in a search engine but it will give advice on how we look at optimising a website and how you could possibly do the same. Please also bear in mind that if your site is even moderately successful, structural changes will affect your search engine results and this could be in a positive and or a negative way.

What not to do
Choosing the right keywords
Titling your pages
Content is king
Search engine basics
Don't overdo it

What not to do

This is critical as many people will jump right in and try and utilise a free 'search engine submission tool', these can have disasterous consequences. Also avoid paying someone a 'fee' to submit you to 500 search engines, this is plain rubbish! Be careful because these programs / sites can be picked up by Google etc and are classed as 'spammers' so submissions by these programs / cheap sites can prevent your site for being listed in Google for at least 6 months!

Choosing the right keywords

Keyword selection is critical to the success of your site. Search engines use keywords to determine what a page is focussed on, this is vital because you do not want to have keywords that people who want your service/product are not searching for. eg. Don't promote "washers" if people search for "nuts and bolts".

You can also do a bit of research by asking yourself, your collegues and clients what they would enter in to Google to find your particular products.

Something else to consider is that if there is a lot of keyword competition for "nuts and bolts" you might want to optimise for "washers" as well because there may not be much keyword competition there.

Keyphrases are also important as people tend to search for multiple words, so "nuts and bolts" will probably have as many searches as just "nuts" or "bolts" by themselves.

Titling your pages

The 'title' tag on your page has great prominence. Each page should have its own customised title tag.

The title tag is what is displayed in your blue bar on the left along the top of your internet browser.

Below is an example of simple HTML with the title tag.

<html> <head> <title>Nuts and bolts Online Store</title> <meta name="description" content="Nuts and bolts online website store, nationwide delivery"> <meta name="keywords" content="nuts,bolts,store,online,nationwide delivery"> </head> <body> Page Content </body> </html>

Content is King

This is a actualy website you are displaying to the internet. You can make it look good, remember to keep things simple and clean - people don't look at busy pages too hard! You should describe the nature of your business, products and services. Focus on using your keywords, but not overly so. This should be between 400 and 600 words. You can repeat your key phrases two or three times. Keep graphics down to a minimum, search engines can't read graphics, but they can read text.

All your links should be text based, not graphics as your menu tends to have good keywords in it. Use: 'Nuts & Bolts' as a link to your product page instead of 'Products'

Remember: Content is King!

Quality content is what search engines want to index and what people want to see. The more pages with quality content, the more people want to visit your website, the more search engines want to index your pages!

Headings should be outlined with <h1>Main Heading</h1><h2>Sub heading 1</h2><h2>Sub Heading 2</h2> as SE's pick this up. Try and include your keyphrases in your heading tags.

SEO Basics

Basic SEO is most effective in unsaturated markets on the internet, it is difficult and extremely costly to break into the top 10 search results for a well established product or service on the net.

Don't overdo it!

Many search engines ignore META tags and many people have left them out. Including correct Meta tags may not improve your ranking, but it will certainly NOT hurt them.
The creators of search engines are prepared to deal decisively with people who are prepared to try and trick them. Don't involve yourself with 'black hat SEO' tricks, it will only get you into trouble in the long run as search engines are constantly updating their algorithms and penalise sites that try and trick them.
Keywords: don't overload your pages with the same keywords, write proper good quality text whilst using your chosen keywords and phrases. Repeating keywords multiple times will hurt your site's ranking
Robots.txt: place a file in your websites 'root' directory called robots.txt with the following in it:
# /robots.txt
# no exclusion at all
Agent: *
Disallow:

Basic SEO Conclusion

SEO is a complicated art, art more than exact science but the guidelines above are a good introduction to the basics of SEO.

Optimisation done in a carefully planned manner can benefit your website immensely, but with changes to your sites structure, this may have both desired and undesired consequences for the traffic arriving at your website.

If you require assistance with SEO, please contact us for a free evaluation. We do provide SEO consulting services and have achieved some amazing results from it.

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