10 tips to improve your search engine ranking – Part 1 Oct 5th '09

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is very much a hot topic at the moment with every website competing to become that elusive number 1 slot. There are many ways which you can boost your search engine ranking for either minimal or no cost at all. This post will go through the first 5 tips which we use for our customers as a starting point in this two part series.

Before you look at SEO you need to have a clear focus on what you want to achieve as well as what keywords you want to focus on. Keywords are either individual words or phrases which users will enter into the search engine trying to find the product or service you offer. For example if you sell blue widgets then you will want to optimise your website for the keyword ‘blue widgets’.

The 10 golden rules

1. Have unique title and descriptions on all your pages
2. Generate a sitemap and submit it to the search engines
3. Make sure that your keywords are in your body text
4. Add your keywords to headers or place emphasis on them in your text
5. Ensure images are properly optimised
6. Code is clean and readable by search engines
7. Submission of website to directories
8. Obtain links from other websites to yours
9. Ensure you have a method to track your progress
10. Create unique new content regularly

By performing these simple 10 rules you should notice your sites performance in the search engines increase. Let’s go through each of these one at a time in a bit more detail…

1. Have unique title and descriptions on all your pages

The title and descriptions of your pages are probably the most important aspect of your website in terms of SEO. These are the first things that users will see when searching for your site on the search engines. The image below shows exactly where your title and description is displayed.

Another point to note is to have unique titles and descriptions for every page. This will help the search engines rank each page properly. Also, include the keywords in both the title and the description to ensure the search engines rank you for the correct keywords.

2. Generate a sitemap and submit it to the search engines

A sitemap is a document which contains all of your pages in an easy to read format. I will let Wikipedia explain more about what Sitemaps are.

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

One of the best websites I have found for generating your own sitemap is XML Sitemaps – Sitemap Generator. This is a simple tool which crawls your website and creates a sitemap for you which you can then submit to the search engines. All three major engines have their own sitemap submission service. Yahoo’s being on their Site Explorer, Google’s being on the Webmaster Tools and Bing’s being on their Webmaster Centre. The submission of the sitemap when you make major content changes will speed up the time before the search engines find your new content.

3. Make sure that your keywords are in your body text

The keywords you have chosen for each page need to be present in the main text of your site. This may seem obvious however many people fail to do this and don’t even think about what content they have on their site. As to how many times your keywords should feature in the text, this is up for discussion however the recommended amount is between 1% and 3%. Too high a keyword density (the official term for this) and the search engines may rank you lower as you could be seen as a spam site. You can check your keyword density on sites such as SEOChat – Keyword Density.

4. Add your keywords to headers or place emphasis on them in your text

Another important area of your website is the headers or sub headers. When a search engine crawls your site it will pick up the headers on the page and assume that the text contained in these headers are more important than the rest of the content. The aim then is to add any keywords you are optimising for to these headers to allow for the search engines to rank that page higher. Of course when you add these keywords you shouldn’t make the header unreadable. You should be writing the content of your site for the user first and the search engine second. The same goes for italic or bold text. The search engine will assume these are of a higher importance.

5. Ensure images are properly optimised

With the focus so far being on the text content it is easy to forget about optimising the images. First of all they should be as small as possible (in terms of size, not height or width). Too many times have I seen raw images which have been taken directly from the digital camera and have 2000 x 1000 dimensions. The images should also be in a web appropriate format such as JPG (if photos) or GIF (if graphics). Again I see BMP files time and time again which are massive in size and will take a while to download in full. In terms of SEO your images should be named correctly and they should have alt parameters which will get scanned by the search engines. Your web developer should be able to help you with this aspect.

Phew! That’s it for now, points 1–5 are above and the rest of the 10 tips will follow in an upcoming blog post. If you have any questions or need any advice feel free to grab Oliver at an upcoming 4Networking meeting, send an email or give us a call, we’re happy to help. Why not subscribe to our RSS Feed if you want to get the second part directly or follow Olly Culverhouse or Christopher Hill on Twitter.

Written by Oliver Culverhouse

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