SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is, in part, a science. To those of us nerdy enough to find it fun, it’s also an art. Search engine usage in Australia has an unsurprising skew towards Google, which holds 86.3% of market share. A distant second and third are Yahoo with 5.3% and Bing with 3.1%. For this reason, the only search engine that optimisers really bother about is Google. With this in mind, the following points are elements of a website to which particular attention should be paid:
Meta Data
Title, Description, Keywords, etc.
Meta data is the set of label information that cannot be seen on your web page. It is of particular interest to Google because these tags are your intended headings and should reflect the most important points of the page. The title tag should contain enough keywords to indicate content, but not enough to be keyword stuffed. This is a fine line that must be walked with every aspect of the website. The description tag is no longer used as a ranking factor, but is still often displayed on the Google results page, so it’s important that you write something succinct and compelling to entice the user to click on your result. Keywords are used by some less popular search engines, but not Google or any of the other majors. It’s still worth filling them in though. There are other more technical meta tags worth including and their content varies for different sites and locations.
URLs
Domain Name, Category Headings and Page Titles.
By far the most important SEO consideration of your website is the top level domain. Top level is your website name, eg: profoundsites.com. You need to talk to your web designer about this before you register the domain name. Category headings should be precise names of your products or services. Page titles should be very close to if not the same as your title meta tag and your H1 page heading.
Headings and Stylings
H1, H2, Bold, etc.
H1, H2, etc. headings hold less weight with Google than they once did, but they still add to the overall relevance of the page. Keywords generally organically find themselves in these titles. Using <strong> styling can also add emphasis to words within your text and Google does take note of the words bolded.
Content
Say something of relevance.
Overwhelmingly the most important thing you can do on your website in the eyes of your customer and of Google, is to give relevant, abundant information on the topic for which you need to rank well. Use correct grammar and spell check thoroughly. Use keywords but use them naturally.
Images
Say something visually.
As important to the appearance of your website as they are to your SEO, images hold more than just the pictures they contain. They also offer the chance to add a title tag and an alt tag. The title tag of an image is the text that pops up when the mouse hovers over the image. This text should contain a short header for the image. The alt tag is what appears in the image box as an alternative should the image fail to load in the user’s browser. This text should be a description of the image.
Website Load Time
Your customers won’t wait forever.
Load time is a relatively new Google ranking factor and although it has nothing to do with website relevance, it serves to show us that Google is trying to enhance the user experience as well as directing them to the information they seek. Load time can be shortened by compressing images, minimising calls to jquery scripts and CSS images.
Internal Links
Drive traffic to what’s important.
Once you get people to your site Google expects that you will direct them efficiently around your site to important information, so links throughout your site, in navigation menus, button links and text links in content can show Google what you find to be important. These links should be used anywhere they are required and ONLY where they are required.
Inbound Links
Bring traffic from other websites.
Links to your site from other websites not only drives traffic, but also drives favour from Google in the form of PageRank. Google Pagerank is a measure of the popularity of your website based on the links from other websites and their own PageRank. This complicated formula can give you a score that can push your website up the Google rankings when your keyphrases are in particularly high competition.
