How to search engine optimise your website has
become a perennial question. You can find hundreds of ways to optimise
your website for search engines but these ways are so many, and so
intricate, that one often feels lost. In this post, very briefly, and
quickly, I’ll explain the most fundamental steps you can take to search
engine optimise your website. Here they are:
Have lots of relevant content
Lots of here means, lots of. The more relevant content you have, the
greater is the chance of getting ranked higher. Lots of pages increase
the probability of getting linked to by other webmasters. The more they
link to you, the greater is the frequency with which the search engines
spider your various pages. The more pages you have indexed, the greater
is the number of people finding you through search engines. So you see,
it becomes a self-feeding cycle. Keep it going by continuously adding
fresh, relevant content to your website.
Create compelling titles and headlines
The search engines carefully evaluate your text in the title and
headlines tags and in fact the title of your web page prominently
appears as a hyperlink on the search engine result pages. Your page
title truly represents the overall subject of your individual web page.
Use your important keywords in your title but only if those keywords
are relevant to your web page.
Similarly, the headings and sub-headings represent paragraphs and
ideas. It’s been observed that once on your page, 8 out of 10 people
will read your headlines but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of the
copy. This is why the search engines pay such a close attention to what
you say within your header tags.
Use your keywords at the right spots
You should use your keywords and key phrases
- As anchor text. Anchor text (text between <a> and </a>)
tells the search engines as well as the human readers the nature of the
web page being linked to. If your keyword appears with the link, it
means you have more information/sources about that keyword.
- In the lists. When you use your keywords in the bulleted lists (<li></li>)
it means you’ve got a list of things about that keyword, and if you
have a list of things about that keyword, then that keyword must be
relevant to what you have on the page.
- As bold text. Just once or twice and don’t overdo it.
- Within the header tags. As mentioned above.
- In the title tag. As mentioned above.
- Once or twice in every paragraph.
Keep your website accessible
Keep your website accessible by keeping it as text-friendly as
possible. Use proper ALT text with IMG tags. Keep the JavaScript and
other bells and whistles to the minimum. Always test your website with
a text-only browser and see that none of your important messages are
left out.
These steps are an important start. Although, as already said, there
are hundreds of things you can do to search engine optimise your
website, these steps can take you a long way in getting good positions
on the search engine result pages.