SEO - Beginners Guidelines

Search Engine Optimisation is the process of optimising a website with the ultimate goal being that the website ranks highly in Search Engines.

 

Good search engine optimisation can help a website to get into the upper reaches of search engines such as Google, Ask and Yahoo. Bad practise can get your site banned so be careful!

 

 

Each search term, keyphrase or 'keywords' have different criteria for ranking well. For example, the set of SEO principles for a football website would be quite different from that of a hairdressers, that's why it's important to study your competition when starting an SEO campaign on your website.

 

There are certain search engine optimisation rules that are fundamental in obtaining a high ranking. These criteria include, submitting to major search engines like Yahoo, Google, Bing and Ask, creating a site-map, creating well written and informative pages and using the correct META information on your web site. There are many other aspects of SEO that I will discuss in later articles.

 

Good SEO techniques that adhere to standardised methods and rules are known as 'White-Hat' techniques. There are some underhand methods of SEO, known as 'Black Hat' methods. These methods are usually applied to get 'quick hits' to a web site.  Black Hat optimising does not always work and such techniques can be rejected by major search engines. If you have starting learning about SEO and are frustrated by a lack of success, don't be tempted by using Black Hat optimisation and submission methods as your website could be banned from search engines. Be patient and don't expect results over night, a typical marketing campaign on a website can take several months to filter into the search engines.

 

Make sure that you make use of tags and meta tags, they are very important. First and most importantly, is the site title, defined as; <title></title>, make this part as informative as possible and try not to go over 65 characters. Do not use too many instances of the same term or word as you will be penalised for it. Next is the description, defined as; <META name ="description" content="">. Remember that Search Engine Robots or Spiders are intelligent and can tell if your META tags are trying to con them or if they are not descriptive of the sites content. Short and sweet is the key here, I would go for 20 words maximum with properly formed sentences. Next are the keywords, add as many variations of terms as you can but don't go over 30 and always try to include those terms in the page somewhere in a coherent sentence. Edit (no longer important in Google!) Always ensure that you do add your META description and keywords, the description is useful in that it informs visitors of what your website is about before they have clicked on it.

Next time we will be taking an in-depth look at Inbound Links.

 

I have been involved in web design for many years and always try to practice White Hat search engine techniques to varied success! Becoming good at SEO takes time and a lot of patience, good luck!

 

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