Just recently I was asked for some ‘pointers’ on how to do SEO on a website. Now usually this would involve money changing hands, but in the spirit of co-operation, I was happy to point the individual in the right direction.
I thought too, that it may be worth sharing these with you.
SEO or search engine optimisation on one level can be a long drawn out affair (and expensive if you are not careful). There are plenty of so called ‘experts’ out there who are determined to part you from your well earned cash.
There is no doubt that for businesses it is important to ensure that their websites are maximising the traffic and hence the potential custom. This involves a whole bunch of techniques that are honestly best left to someone with the knowledge, expertise and commerical nous to do it on their behalf. That last element is the one that most SEO providers lack.
The tips that I am going to outline here are within most people’s capabilities with only a very small technical knowledge required.
So where to start?
1. The basics!
Name pages with something relevant – page1, page2 etc (as generated by some template software) is a waste of time.
In CMS websites, use search engine friendly strings. index.php?page=12 is useless. Tells nothing about the content and search engines tend to stop at the ? mark. WordPress will manage this for you through the permalink function. Just choose the format that suits you best. I personnally prefer the name of the page right after the site name eg ian-young.co.uk/top-tips-for seo. To do this just add /%postname%/ in custom field in permalinks settings.
2. Some elementary page optimisation.
To manage this, you need to be able to access the coding of your website – if a straight forward html site. CMS sites make this easy for you.
Meta headers: These are found within the <head> area of the html page. For our purposes there are three:
<title></title>
<meta name =”description” content =” “/>
<meta name =”keywords” content =” ” />
Of these the first two are the most important and title is the most important of all.
Keywords whilst useful, is less important but if used in combination with the other two can be a powerful tool.
So how do we use these to our advantage? All will be explained in the next post.