Search Engine Tips for Budding Web Designers

Find the right keyword

Keywords – the words you think people will use to find your website and in turn buy your products. That’s what it’s all about! It all starts with finding the right keywords.

Find the best keywords using tools such as Wordtracker. You are looking for keywords / phrases that carry the most traffic (volume) and yet are still viable targets (KEI). In a nutshell, the words people use a lot and we can still get good results for.

KEI or Keyword Effectiveness Index is a measure of a keywords performance. It is a mathematical equation that compares the popularity of a keyword against it’s competition. The higher the value the higher your chances of getting a result.

KEI of less than 0.1 is not really viable. You would need to throw everything at this keyword to get results.

Competitors to that keyword?

Use a backlinks tool (there are loads on the internet to choose from) to research their link popularity. Gives some indication as to how many links are needed to get results.

No1 competitor HTML

Check their website code for keyword density, H1, H2, H3, Title tags etc, basically looking for any area we can improve.

2. Improve your HTML

Improve your HTML to be w3c valid, semantic mark-up, correct use of keyword rich tags; Title, H1,H2,H3 etc. Very importantly, take the time to write your own text content for your pages – don’t copy / paste your way to full content.

Search engines know if it’s found the exact text content elsewhere and may put your webpage in to it’s supplemental index as a result. Try getting pages out of there! Better to write your own good content to start with and get a friend to proof read it for typos etc.

Some HTML tips with SEO in mind:

Write a good meta tag description – put phone numbers at the end of this. Google uses this tag as the text for your listing IF you do not have a listing in DMOZ, in that case it takes the description from there.

Some people pick up the phone and dial numbers straight form the search results pages. You may not have had the click but you have had a customer call you.

Title tag - Write a keyword rich title tag, most important keywords first. 60 characters max.

Keywords tag – things have changed since the bad old days of spam SEOing. If you include a keywords tag it is good practice to only include words that appear in your body content. This tag is all but redundant now.

Write clean code. Link to external stylesheets and Javascript files. Use semantic mark-up. Your first few lines of code after the tag should be a H1 tag (with your chosen keywords of course!) Why not follow this up with a sub heading H2 with even more keywords in?

Write good copy that reads well to a human and includes keywords for the search engines. Do not shoe horn keywords in or overdo it. The search engines are always looking for pages that work well for humans – NOT search engine robots. Maybe bold or italicise a paragraph (with keywords) this places a little more importance on those words.

If you have to have flash files or lots of images, use CSS positioning to place those div elements at the bottom of your code. Your code should be HTML light and text content heavy for best results. Good content as near to the top of your code as possible.

Navigation – Use text links, get a keyword in if you can but it’s not always possible. Always use absolute links with a title and not relative links.

Links to your homepage should always be to the domain name itself and not /index.html. If you don’t, the search engines will think you have two homepages – one at the domain name and one at mywebsite.co.uk/index.html. This will result in watered down pagerank for your homepage at the very least.

I like to add a keyword link at the very bottom of the HTML code too.

If you are targeting many keywords, write new pages with the above methods for each keyword page. No one page fix exists for all desired keywords.

SEO, search engine optimisation search engines, HTML and SEO, on page optinisation, off page optimisation

Search engine optimisation is a huge and complicated subject. This article is written to help those with an interest in the subject to understand a little more. There is also a few tips for the more practiced Search engine optimisation specialists.

IC endorses Chris Tyrrell who writes for Interdesigns a Leicester web design company. You can find out more about SEO and good web design at the Interdesigns website.

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