Search engine optimisation
Making your site search engine friendly
Currently the most used search engine is Google so this brief article focuses on Google as the target engine.
The method Google uses to decide on the indexing criteria for your page is based on several things (this is a very simplistic view but good enough for the purposes of this brief overview). There are many sites covering this subject. We would recommend http://searchenginewatch.com/ if you want to research further.
Here are the main four areas:
- The page title. This is incredibly important.
- The page textual content with the first paragraph/sentence as the most important then moving down.
- Any links on your page, it looks at the linked wording.
- Any text marked as heading. Starting with the style Heading1 (h1) going down to Heading6 (h6)
In addition to this it is still good practice to include what are called META TAGS in every page. These are tags that cannot be seen by the user but tell some search engines what the page is about. META TAGS used to be the main search engine guide but so many porn sites flooded the web with meta tags that had no bearing on the content they basically became of little use as a guide.
The two main META TAGS from your point of view are:
Keywords – This should have between 2 and 10 keywords that your customers might use to find your page. For example “bottle,tag,theft,protection,security”
Description – The should have a description of your pages content up to 15 words long. For example “Bottle tags used to protect any shaped bottle from theft.”
When creating or updating your site you need to create the following for each page:
- Title
- Keywords for the META TAG
- Description for the META TAG
ATNET will then go through each page adding all the information you’ve supplied as well as reviewing the page text and adding / modifying the content, heading and links to suit the tags / title.
This sounds like a lot of effort but it’s well worth it. You don’t need to do it all at once. Choose the most important pages on your site and start there adding others when you have 30 minutes to spare.
