Do it yourself Search Engine Optimization

Make no mistake, search engine optimisation is a professional job. However there are some things you can do yourself to ensure a significant advantage over your competition. Below are eight things to consider when you are trying to make your own improvements

Site Page Naming and Relevant Word Consistency
Page names are important! Relevant pages should be named after their primary keyword phrase. If you have a page about web design it should be called web design. It should contain the words web design in the Title, description and keywords for that page. What is more you need to have H1 tags around you first heading on the page and H2 tags lower down – Both using the words web design in them.

Site File Names
Like the directory structure, file names play an equally important role. All file names should contain primary keywords or keyword phrases.

Meta Tags
Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly, and are inserted into the HTML code in the format illustrated above, but are not visible to a user looking at the site.Meta tags are one of the most important elements of a web page when a search engine indexes it. This was originally created to help search engines find out important information about your page that they might have had difficulty determining otherwise. For Example, related keywords or a description of the page itself.

A search engine to display a short description of what your web page contains very often uses the description Meta tag. Some search engines look at the keywords entered into the keywords meta tag and will use this to display your page in the search results if it is one of the words used in the search criteria.

Web Page Copywriting
Like a Meta and Title tags, the content of your page is an important element in the search engine optimisation process. The page copy being the actual, visible main content of the page should be presented and arranged in a logical and visually pleasing manner.

1. For the best results each page you submit should contain at least 200 words.
2. Include all keywords and arrange them in logical and readable manner.
3. More interlinking of keywords throughout the website.

Site Navigation
Is your site’s navigation search engine friendly? Search engines require simple text based navigation in order to correctly spider your website. Java Script based navigation only, results in an incomplete index of your website. Some important suggestions for site navigation:

1. Avoid using flash at main page.
2. Addition of keyword related text based navigation should be added to the bottom of all pages.
3. Using Sitemap
4. Avoid using image based navigation
Image ‘alt’ Attribute

Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

1. Do not use more than 2-3 keywords per page
2. Describe the image and don’t just list the keywords.

Link Popularity
Link popularity is how many other websites are pointing to your website. If you have 199 Web pages pointing to your domain, then your link popularity is 199. Link popularity varies because each engine indexes the web differently. Ideally you would want a minimum of several hundred links per search engine, back to your website; but actual figures depend on the number of links held by your competition.

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