Search Engine Optimisation in a nutshell:
1. Choose your keywords. These are simply three or four phrases that are most likely to be used by people wanting to find your website (each phrase being one keyword) - what will they type into their search engine in order to find YOU.
Use KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker to help with this - you can get a free trial for one week; perhaps plan to work on this during a specific week and make best use of this access. Each page of the website can have its own set of keywords, with your home page being considered of highest importance.
2. There are a number of places to use your keywords:
- The title of the page - one of the most important places
- often wasted with the company name, "Welcome", or even just "Home
Page". Instead, use your
keywords to describe the page.
- Through the text of the pages so that it still reads sensibly; you
can incorporate your keywords through the content with careful editing.
- The meta tags - not as relevant these days, but some of the smaller
search engines still look at these, and you never know when Google just
might start again, so worth doing - separate each phrase with a comma,
not each word, and again just focus on a few so that these are not diluted.
- Links within your website - if you can have links from your keywords
to other pages, this increases the importance of the page it's linking
to. And place the link on the keywords where possible - for instance if I was
to link to our home page for web design
in Kent, having the link on those words
makes the page we're linking to more important.
- Links from other websites:
- spend time researching other websites from
which to request links - not link farms or websites that have nothing
to do with yours, but valid directories - either industry specific,
or business directories, any local directories, etc.
- You can see some of the websites
linking to your competitors (for instance) by typing
"links: www.domainname.co.uk" into the Google search box (so to see who is linking to our website, you would type in "links: www.elementally.co.uk").
- On most directory
websites there will be an "add url", "suggest a site", or somesuch
from which to request a link to your website.
- If you write press releases, these can be submitted to central agencies, with your live link from each - these can be useful and well regarded.
- spend time researching other websites from
which to request links - not link farms or websites that have nothing
to do with yours, but valid directories - either industry specific,
or business directories, any local directories, etc.
3. Do not use "black hat" optimisation techniques such as hiding text, keyword stuffing, creating pages of links just to try to improve your rating, etc - these may work in the short term, but not for long and are highly likely to result in your domain being blacklisted in the long term. We would also suggest that the common suggestion to use image alt tags for your keywords is not what they're there for - these are for accessibility purposes - to give people a description of the image in case they cannot see it for whatever reason.
4. Submitting your website to the search engines - well this may not be as necessary as it once way, with the engines becoming more sophisticated and more thorough about trawling the web themselves - see our list here for the ones we have actioned. One important recent addition to this is to submit your site map to the Google Sitemap facility - this will keep them thoroughly informed about your website. Also the Google Information for Webmasters section provides much information on what they consider acceptable and what not - worth a read and
Bear in mind that whatever you do is going to take some time to show up on the search engines, and to aim for the first page of any search engine is likely to be unrealistic in the short term, at least unless your service/product/information is very specialised or localised. Achieving a good listing takes at least two of the following: time, work and money, to achieve these days. If getting more immediate results, consider a PPC (pay per click) campaign, such as Google Adwords or Overture - and these are a whole other science!
If you want to study search engine optimisation further, we recommend Mike Grehan's website and book, anything by/from Jill Whalen, and Shari Thurow's book "Search Engine Visibility". Also, it´s worth taking a look at the Honest SEO report - a straightforward guide for any one wanting to know more about search engine optimisation - easy to read and very useful - highly recommended.
And while we're about it (and until the book is written), check your accessibility - think about how someone with the graphics switched off would view your website, how would be navigate between pages, and do the images have alt tags - let us know if you want to know when "accessibility in a small nutshell" is complete!