Website design search engine optimisation tips and tricks

So you've got a website, but how can you get browsers to look at it? Here is a beginner's guide to Search Engine Optimisation with a few tips to get your website to number 1 on Google and the other search engines‚ yourself.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) starts the moment your website is designed and developed. Ideally it should be created with the search engines in mind in a way that already boosts it's ranking before you start.

Steve Fearn our interactive designer says On-page optimisation is crucial and any designer worth their salt knows the ins and outs of it. For example flash websites may look pretty, but they are next to useless viewed on a on an iphone and won't be picked up by the search engines. It‚ 'old technology'.

Once your site is live the next step is to start the off-page optimising.

  1. Make a list of the main words that a potential customer of yours would search for on Google. These are your ‚'keywords'.
  2. Make sure the keywords are included in the title of each of your pages that you would want to rank on Google.
  3. Ensure that the keyword appears at least four times on each relevant page.*
  4. Include photos and graphics on your page, and include the keyword in the captions for the pictures. This can provide a big search engine boost.
  5. This is the key strategy. Get other websites to link to your page (contact other companies and request a reciprocal link, whereby you each link to each others sites.) This is essential if you want to appear high up on Google. It's all about links.

But that's just the beginning,

You need to be tweaking your site content and SEO all the time to keep yourself noticed by Google etc, so having your own easy to use content management system is fairly crucial. We don't develop sites without this facility these days.

On a regular basis you should:

  1. Upload new images
  2. Write a blog
  3. Change the news/features/special offers area on your homepage
  4. Change chunks of copy adding new of different keywords
  5. Add new links

By using Google‚ Pay per click Advertising system‚ Google Adwords or Facebook advertising, you can also get to the top quickly so it's worth considering a monthly budget for this.

*Getting the balance of keywords versus good copy right can be hard. A good copywriter is skilled in this area and can help you if you get stuck.

Posted 12 years ago by Default Admin 2 Minute(s) to read