| As we all know only too well it is getting hard to get a good listing in search engines as these themselves battle to remove spam, junk and other irrelevant content and your competitors jockey for position with you but there are a few things you can do to help yourself and your website. All search engines look at your site in different ways and these all have different criteria on how to list a site and the raking it gets, however they all have some in common and the following information will help your rankings on most search engines. |
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| Domain name: | The domain name really needs to have at least one of your important keywords within it and the age of the domain can sometimes help, the older the better. Example; Explanamic.co.uk means very little to humans or search engines and contains no keywords so obtaining additional domains such as darlingtonwebdesign.co.uk which contains 3 keywords and sitedesign4u.co.uk which contains 2 keywords not only aid humans in readying what the site is about but also aids search engines listing your site better. |
| Page name: | While all major search engines are happy to list dynamic page names such as products.asp?id=123 again this means little to nothing to search engines and humans so a better approach would be to use a more meaningful name such as Webdesign.asp. Further enhancements can be achieved if the page name also contains keywords of the product and better still if the page name has keywords which are also found in the domain name. |
| Page title: | Your page title should contain keywords and again be meaningful to humans but try to keep it to no more than 80 characters in length. When possible and practical this should also be found in the main body text of the page. Welcome to Explanamic – this would be considered to be a poor title for search engine placement Welcome to Explanamic web site development & scripting – this would be far better as it not only aids search engine placement as it contains keywords, which are also found in the domain name but also for humans reading it. |
| Page content: |
It goes without saying you need content here as this will be used to help sell or advertise your products and services. Search engines love words and so do humans although it is just as important not to over do things., while search engines will be happy for you page to contain thousands of words the average human will not be so grateful particularly on an ecommerce site. The page should be at least 1 to 2 paragraphs in size which in turn should contain keywords relating to the page. where possible it is also recommended to repeat these keywords on the page a few times, BUT only if it fits the write up and again don't over do it. 2 or 3 times is more than adequate. You can further improve your pages search engine importance by adding well written descriptive links and the use of H1 type tags. |
| Images: |
Images go a long way to make your site more attractive and allow clients to see what a product looks like but these can also be used as a good SEO tool by adding ALT tags. When adding an ALT tag try to keep it short and if practical add a keyword to it, avoid having all your images on the same page using the same ALT tag as this will degrade their worth. An additional benefit of ALT tags is it allows disabled users to understand your site better as some will use "screen readers" and these machine will pick up on the ALT tags. |
| Links: | Links not only allow users to browser your site but these can also be used to aid your ranking in search engines by adding title tags. Title tags show when a user leaves their mouse over a link and the information should contain a good description of what the link is about and contain keywords. again do not over do it and leave the title tag to around 4- 8 words. |
| Descriptive text links: | These are very similar to normal links as above but rather than "click here" being the link descriptive links would be more like "click here to learn more about our web design services" with every word being the link. |
| Meta description: | This is a hidden bit of text which is used mainly by search engines, this should be no more than 200 characters in length and again include keywords. Further improvements would be to have the description as the opening paragraph of the page. |
| Meta keywords: | Again used by search engines and clients searching for your site. Try to avoid adding hundreds of keywords as this is not liked by search engines, we would recommend no more than 500 characters in length and these keywords ideally need to be found in the page content. A keyword such as website will work better than websites. |
| Font colour: | For people viewing your site and for search engines it is very important not to have the font colour the same or close to the same colour as the background of your page. Doing this would not only make it hard for people to read but search engines class this as a spam attempt and may even remove your site from their listings. |
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