matthewkerry.com
Search Engine Optimisation Hints and Tips
I have recently been working with a businesswoman called Jane Read on her site CityChallengeUK.com. I will use this site as an example when I'm describing the type of work I do below.
The first thing required for optimisation is a list of 20 keywords/phrases that your site will be optimised on. For City Challenge they keywords included "team building", "team building events", "team building oxford", team building cambridge", "leadership skills" and so on. In order to arrive at these keywords we put ourselves in the shoes of a prospective client and thought what they would be likely to search for.
Google Suggest is a cool beta tool that *might* help you with your choice of keywords:
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Search engines look at several parts of a page in order to check for keywords. I will work through each of these in turn.
Page Title:
INSERT PIC OF PAGE TITLE
The page titles has 2 search engine related uses. Firstly it's the page title that is displayed in the search results in many of the engines.
INSERT PIC OF GOOGLE RESULTS PAGE
The second is that search engines use the page title to hunt for keywords. Therefore your page title should be a balance between an informitve and welcoming message for users and a keyword rich search engine friendly inroduction.
Meta Keywords:
These are not the holy grail of search engine optimisation that they used to be, however, some search engines still use them and it's worth giving your keywords some thought.
Page Body:
This is where the real action happens. Content is King and Google certainly believes that. You can do all the search engine optimisation in the world, but if your content isn't relevant then you won't ranking highly.
Headings Within the Page:
Google will look through your page and will add important to content between heading tags, so h1, h2, h3 etc. The use of these heading tags is two fold. One, it will help your ranking with Google if you put keywords in the heading tags throughout your site. Two, if you use heading tags in conjunction with CSS it will allow your site to have a consistant look-and-feel and will make maintanance easier in the long term.
Domains/Filenames:
Google will search your domain name and filenames for keywords. It is therefore important to strike a balance between a domain that allows people to find your business and one that make Google happy - and filenames that are easy to maintain, human readable, but also help your ranking.
Links:
Search engines, particularly Google, look to see how many other sites link to your site - and each link is interpreted as a referral. Obviously, the more referrals a site has the higher it ranks. In order to see how many other sites link to yours, you can query Google using:
link:www.citychallengeuk.com
Submit your site to the top Web site directories, including dmoz.org, Google Directory, LookSmart and Yahoo Directory. These directories feed into the major search engines and will also count as a referral.
Submission:
There are many, many search engines and lots of tools are available to help you submit your site automatically. However, the some search engines don't like automatic submission tools and your site may be penalised if you use them. Submission by hand, at least to the 3 most important engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) is well worth the effort.
Our current rankings:
team building - Top 30
team building events - Top 30
team building oxford - Number 1!
team building cambridge - Top 10
team building london - Top 30