Search Engines (SEO): What can be done?
What is SEO and Search Engine Ranking
- There are a few definitions for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Search Engine Ranking, but to most people, and to us essentially, it means how far up or down the list of search results your website is when people do a search for a specific term on a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing. The importance of this varies much depending on your type of business, and how important search engine traffic is to your website and business.
- More extensive definitions available on Wikipedia for SEO and Search Engine Ranking
SEO: What you can do:
Different search engines rank websites differently. Doing the same search on Google might place you in a totally different position in the search results than with Yahoo. There are however a few standard (and FREE) things you can do that could improve (but not guarantee) a better search engine ranking:
- First thing you should do is choose the most important keywords. Keywords are those words/terms you think people will type into the search engine in order to display your website as a search result. If you have a chat website in South Africa, you’d choose eg. chat, rooms, south, africa. Don’t go nuts, choose 1-5 keywords at most, otherwise it might be impossible (or very impractical) to implement the following steps effectively.
- If you haven’t registered your domain name yet, try to incorporate the most important keywords into your domain name (without ending up with one that’s too long and tedious to type out). Using the example of chat again, you’d register eg. www.chat.co.za.
- Use these keywords often in the text of your website. It is recommended that your home page contain 100-200 words minimum in total for search engines to see it as relevant enough to index.
- Use these keywords in the beginning and end of as many pages as possible. The first sentence/paragraph of your home page will be seen as the most important, so make it as descriptive as possible while keeping it short enough.
- The keywords should be in bold as often as possible
- Use the keywords in headings and titles of pages.
- Use the keyword in page names where you can, eg “chat.htm”.
- IMPORTANT: Get as many as possible websites to link back to yours.
SEO: What we can do:
We don’t specialise in SEO. It can be a long and tedious process – quite a science if you want it done right. There are however a few basic things that we can do to improve (but not guarantee) your search engine ranking.
- We’ll make sure your site is submitted to Google, Yahoo, Bing & ODP.
- Your pages will be easy to navigate by search engines
- Mata tags like keywords, descriptions and page titles (a bit of code behind the scenes) are put in place
- We make sure images have relevant tags where applicable.
Need something more advanced? We’ll gladly refer you to the experts when we’re done designing your site!
