5 Tips to help google find your site!
Posted by Sherwell Graphics | Filed under Sherwell Graphics and Your Business
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is extremely important when it comes to your website being found, and is a largely discussed topic on the web. While we recommend you leave all the messing about with website code to a search engine professional, it helps to understand and implement at least the basics of search engine optimization.
SEO Tip #1: Find the Best Keywords
It would be a waste of your time to optimize your website for keywords that are not even being searched for. Therefore you should invest some energy into finding the best keywords. There are several SEO tools available on the Internet to help you find the best keywords. Tip: Don’t be deceived by organizations that require you to register first. The two most popular resources are WordTracker and KeywordDiscovery.com.
SEO Tip #2: Discover Your Competitors
It’s a fact and one of the top 10 SEO tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.
SEO Tip #3: Optimize Your Title
There are different theories about how long your Title should be. Since Google only displays the first 66 or so characters (with spaces), our Tips for the title would be to keep it under 66 characters and relevant to the content on the page. However, some may argue that the value of the homepage title may warrant additional search term inclusion. Bar none the most important of the top 10 SEO tips involves your keywords. If you wish to be on the first page of the search results, you must include your keywords in your Title tag. Preferably before all other words in the Title. No need to repeat your keywords in the Title, that’s interpreted as spam by the search engines.
SEO Tip #4: Optimize Your META Tags
META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords. Meta tags summarize what the site is about, and despite some SEO controversy, they still play an instrumental role in meta-based search engines. The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:
• description
• keywords
The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. There’s also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. We’ve seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so we don’t think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.
However, if you want the listing to look clear and to the point, our tips for this META tag would be to keep it under 150 characters and to not repeat your keywords more than 3 times.
The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google’s search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. SEO Tip: if you repeat your keywords more than 3 times it can be a pretty good indication to the search engine that you are trying to spam their search results. Also, don’t waste your time including keywords that aren’t used in the BODY section of your website, that could be seen as another spam technique.
SEO Tip #5: Use Headings
In college and some high schools, essays are written using a standard guideline created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). These guidelines included how to write you cover page, title, paragraphs, how to cite references, etc. On the Web, we follow the W3C’s guidelines as well as commonly accepted “best practices” for organizing a web page. Headings play an important role in organizing information, so be sure to include at least H1-H3 when assembling your page. Search engine optimisation experts will tell you that an ill-planned page title is the Achilles Heel of a web page. It is referenced by search engines and must be considered seriously.