With the sheer number of sites online now it is more important than ever to correctly optimise your website for search engines, and particularly for the most successful engine Google. It is not as complicated as you may think to complete a full SEO overhaul of your website to make it more appealing to Google. There are many, many more technique’s that can be used to gain page rank but this is a basic guide to get you on the right track.

Content is King

One of the most important actions you can take is to make sure your website is kept up to date with original, relevant and engaging content. If you can regularly update your content and include lots of your relevant search terms it can only improve your websites credibility with Google.

Page Title

It is crucial to get your page title correct as this is the first thing that Google looks at and it is displayed within your search engine results. Your title should give a short intro to your site and have your most important keywords included, don’t just pack your title with keywords, you need to have a balance so it still makes sense to your potential visitors but you have a good helping of keywords in there to. Your title should be no more than 70 characters.

Meta Tags

The Meta Tags are found in the Head of your page and are called “Description” & “Keywords”, these are not visible to your visitors but they are used by search engines to categories your website pages, your sites description should be a full sentences or two and needs to give an explanation of your website, you want to include your top keywords but make sure it still makes sense or it may harm you SEO efforts, the description should be no longer than 160 characters.

Your Keywords are a list of the search terms you think your potential visitors are going to use to find your product or service, it is worth spending some quality time on deciding what your keywords will be as this impacts your entire SEO strategy and success. You can enter just individual words or whole phrases, your keyword research should identify what’s best for your business. You should have no more than 10 keywords or phrases, any more than this may dilute your SEO results.

Header Tags

Using Header Tags correctly will help search engines identify the key points within the text content of your page. H1 tags are usually used for page/article titles and is considered the most important. Using H2 & H3 tags is important to establish other important text content i.e. introductions. Do not just make all of your text H1 as this will just dilute your overall SEO efforts and may even decrease your website viability within Google.

Alt Attributes

Alt Attributes are use to give descriptions to images, your description is then added to your websites source code and if an image does not load your visitors will at least see a description of what should be there.

Title Attributes

You can use the Title Attributes to add extra information to text or images and it is used as an alternative or along side your Alt Attributes, if you enter the same info as your Alt Attributes you will ensure your tooltip information will be seen in all browsers.

Sitemap

Sitemaps are used to show search engines pages within your website and helps them to be crawled and index all the pages included within your sitemap.

Links

One of the best ways to increase your websites search engine position is by other websites linking to yours, the more quality links you have the more important Google thinks you are and ranks you accordingly. It is very important and most effective to have natural links from sites that have a high page rank and are relevant to the content or subject of your own website. It will harm your SEO efforts if you simply buy lots of irrelevant links from unrelated sites. The key to great links is to produce great content which people will want to link to.

URL’s

Search Friendly URL’s contain keywords that are relevant to the content on the page. For example, if the page is about Social Media your page URL might be {yourdomiannam.co.uk/socialmedia.html}

Social Media

Although Social Media isn’t usually seen as an SEO tool the use of sites like Twitter & Facebook is a great way of getting traffic to your site and with Google now showing real time results pulled from Twitter and other Social Networks it is a channel not to be ignored.

In closing – Basic SEO as described above is fairly easy to implement but it is surprising how many companies still aren’t optimising their online presence correctly. Before you undertake any of these steps make sure you have done your keyword/phrase research or all these steps will be useless and will not help to drive traffic to your website.