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Learn the Basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)Website optimization otherwise known as search engine optimization or SEO, is an important aspect to getting your website tuned up. This tuning up is required for several reasons and most importantly so the search engines can hopefully find your website and once found, to rank it better. In reality it is not really SEO that gets your website get indexed but it helps. What is does do is to play a role in is getting your website hopefully ranked a bit higher in the results listings for a given keyword. You see, search engines have what are called ‘spiders’, these are little programs that search the Internet for websites to list and rank in the results listings. If you imagine that the Internet is a vast library and each book in the library is a website. Now, the search engine spider is the librarian and they want to have a quick overview of what books they have in stock. Rather than read all the books in stock, you may simply just look at the covers, flick through the contents page and read a paragraph or two of each page and then make a quick note of it. This is basically what the search engines do to find and list websites. Now, if the librarian comes across a plain, book with no good information or organisation, then the librarian doesn’t give much time to it as there are so many other books to flick through. If the librarian comes across a well-organised book and nicely laid out with the title, contents page and a good paragraph or two, then it will be more pleased with it.
So, what you are going to do is make your website into this nice, well organised book so the librarian can find it easily and flick through it to find the information it needs. It does take a little bit of technical work but I will make it as painless as possible. In fact, the whole field of SEO is vast and many books have been written on the subject. It is constantly changing as the search engines constantly change the way they index sites so I will only outline some basics which are still true as of this writing and will hopefully help you rank a bit better.
Meta Tags
<Title>
<Keywords>
<Description>
Google doesn't really take much notice of meta tags but the other search engines do. The <title> tag is the most important one and most experts believe all search engines take notice of this one. It does no harm in having the meta tags in, so why not include it anyway for those that do use them.
<H1> This is the heading of the first paragraph. This is also an important tag to use. Make sure your keyword is in the heading.
OK, so you have the meta-tags, but where do you put them? This is the more techie part as you will need to place them in the HTML code. You can only do this if you have access to the HTML code. Copy the HTML code below and paste it into Notepad on your computer. Replace the text with your own details (title, keywords, description) for the page you are optimizing. <title>REPLACE WITH
PAGE TITLE HERE</title> Right. Now you need to get to the HTML code and go to the start of the code. If you look at the screenshot below, I use Frontpage. You can see the meta tags placed on lines 4-6. I've placed a gap above and below just so you can see it more clearly, the space is not necessary. You are looking for the <head> tag (line 2 in the picture) and the HTML tags can go right after it. There should be a closing </head> tag after but not necessarily immediately after. Save your work and upload it. When you check your page online, you should see the new title at the top of the browser.
If you right-click on your webpage, and select "view source code", Notepad will open up and all the HTML code for the webpage be displayed. You should see your meta tags at the top of the code somewhere!
One final thing with the HTML. You need to sort out the <H1> tag or heading tag. It tells the spider what the main heading of your page is. With Frontpage, it is simply a case of highlighting the heading and then selecting <h1> as the type of text it is. So, for this page, the heading is "Search Engine Optimization". Hopefully whatever package you are using for your webpages, you can simply highlight the text and then select H1 for the type of text. If your package does not allow you to do that for whatever reason, you will have to bring up the HTML code and find the main text and heading. When you have found the heading text, you need to surround it with the following tags: <h1>HEADING GOES HERE</h1> There you go. The main tags would be the <title> tag and the <H1> tag.
OK, now something a little easier!! Go to your website text. Each page should be focused on a particular keyword or theme. You need to sprinkle your website text with your keyword phrase, but not too much else you may be accused of 'keyword spamming' and penalised for it! The best way would to ensure if possible you have at least 300 words on the page, ideally around 500 words. Then, right at the very first paragraph, in the first sentence make sure you put your keyword there somewhere. Then put it in the middle of the website text, and once more again right at the very last paragraph as near to the last sentence as possible. It is very important that you ensure that the site still reads very well. That is your main priority. Quality content is the main guideline. Adding these bits in is the icing on the cake so to speak.
So, there you go, some very basic SEO techniques for you to apply to your website.
TASK Please backup your website before making any changes in case! 1) Write the HTML tags as described above for each of your pages and insert it into the correct place in the HTML code. 2) Add your keyword at the beginning, middle and end of the text. 3) Upload the newly optimized pages to your site.
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