Search engine optimisation is a real buzz topic right now, wikipedia describes it as
“the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic“) search results for targeted keywords.”
Basicially it is all about getting your site to rank high in the search engines such as Google and Yahoo for certain keywords, so for example say you have travel website which has scottish accommodation and you want to rank for the keyword “hotels scotland” well thats where SEO comes in.
So what do you do first, just pick a keyword and place it all over your webpage? erm no! The first thing you must do is find the RIGHT keyword and this is where keyword research comes in, there are a couple of free tools for this Keyword Discovery and Google Keyword Tool are a good place to start. Now make sure you spend some time on this becuase if you go and optimise your site for the wrong keywords then you are not going to get the full benifit from your SEO.
So now you have that right keywords its time to get your page optimised, now there are onpage and offpage factors that effect your ranking. The onpage factors are things that you can change on your webpage (text,meta tags etc..) and the offpage are things like Links (anchor text, PR, relevancy).
So lets start with some onpage things, here are the top three:
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First has to be the Title tag (what you see when your site appears on the search engine page). This is given a lot of weight so make sure you have at least 2 keywords in there, even three at a push.
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The next part is text, make sure you have some text on your page, probably around a 200 words. Then ensure your keywords are somewhere in the text (possibly in an h1 tag) but make sure you dont overdo it, you only want the density of the keywords to be around 2-5% (so one keyword per 100 words appx).
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Images- Search Engines cant read images but they can do two things with them, one they can read the image name ie pic.jpg so change the file names to be more descriptive such as hotel-pic1.jpg or burns-hotel.jpg. Next make sure you have added an alt tag and try and include one of you keywords in an alt tag on the page where possible
Thats all for now, i will do a section on offpage optimisation soon.
