Search Engine Optimisation

Getting Good Rankings for your Website

One of the most hyped topics online in the last few years has been search engine optimisation.

Five to ten years ago (whilst not wanting to generalise too much) most companies were just concerned with getting an internet presence and joining the online bandwagon. It was a nice to have, as online sales were generally slow with people having poor internet connections and not too many people having access.

In the last few years, however, with quicker connections and more people online, there has been more money to be made online. Now having a website is a must have not a nice to have for virtually all businesses. And this means there are many more websites out there all competing for the same sort of traffic as your site.

Whatever it is you offer, whether information or a product, chances are someone else has got there before you, and there is a bigger player in the market. Therefore when people search for keywords or phrases related to your site, it may be a bit of a battle to get good placement for those search terms and as a result, a good ranking.

Enter search engine optimisation, a process that is supposed to help you 'optimise' your site so that when someone searches for a term related to your site you have an increased chance of getting a good ranking for the search term and getting people through to your site, rather than to a competitor site.

The core process of search engine optimisation is really quite simple, yet many people dress it up as some strange, mysterious process that is only the domain of the professionals. Like anything experience of optimising sites helps you do it better and quicker, but most people can take the basic steps, and truth be told it is mostly common sense and - in fact - good practice.

After all, if you are going to build a new web page, search engine optimisation suggests it should have a clear purpose. That's good general practice too; why create a page if you are not sure what it is for? Specifically, each page should focus on an individual topic. Let's imagine we are building a website of our favourite recipes.

At the moment, we have one web page called 'my favourite recipes' with ten different recipes on it. For better performance for your readers and for search engines, you should split that web page into ten individual pages, one per recipe. This means ten shorter but more focussed pages. So rather than one page with your favourite chicken casserole and the perfect cheese on toast, you have separate pages on each.

This allows you to focus each page more specifically on that topic, which is good for people searching. No one is going to search for 'chicken casserole and cheese on toast recipes' whilst many may search for 'chicken casserole recipe' or similar. If you have a web page that focusses in on what people are likely to search for, chances are you will get more search engine traffic. And not only that, the page is more useful for your visitors too as they come straight to the information they want and don't have to wade through reams of information about how to make the perfect jam sandwich.

Good search engine optimisation is good practice in general. It encourages you to think about the text and words you use on your page. It encourages you to split out your page content with a page heading and title, then sub headings as you go along. You might like to make some key information bold in your page, and use bullet point lists.

It also tells you to be specific in your wording. Don't use 'it', 'them', 'they' or 'stuff' where possible, but if it reads naturally use the topic of the page again instead. Thus when you finish off the webpage on chicken casserole it is better to write:
"There you go - the perfect chicken casserole" than "And that's how you make it".

In terms of getting a good search engine ranking, it also helps to update your content regularly and for your website to have been around for some time and therefore be seen as something of an authority on a topic. Too many people create a site full of enthusiasm and are dismayed at low rankings immediately. Well, Rome wasn't built in a day. You have to work at a good ranking by adding content steadily, updating content, and ensuring you have clear good quality pages.

That fantastic Flash based navigation menu you made and that initial page that shows off your design flair with a 'skip intro' link might look cool to you, but don't expect good search engine rankings with that in place. If you do get good rankings then it is in spite of how your site is laid out rather than because of it.

Keep things simple. Have text based navigation, and don't call the link 'another recipe' but call it 'chicken casserole recipe' so people know what they will get - this helps search engines know what people will get, too.

Don't get hung up on the micro-details like whether to use hyphens or underscores in your URLs - the difference this will have on rankings is so minimal as to not worry about. You don't really need to load your URLs with page keywords either; the on page content is the key to good rankings, not the meta-data such as the URL and the keywords and content information you give.

That said, it is a good idea to write a clear, concise and accurate meta description tag for each page. That's because if your site comes up as a search result in google and you have a meta description in place, that information will be shown underneath your page title. Therefore at the point of a potential visitor deciding which site to go to, that meta description can influence their decision your way.

If you would like more information on this topic, or a review and some tips for your site, please visit the Clarity Media search optimisation information.

Author: Dan

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Last Updated: Aug 29th 2006

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