SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation – it’s a term given to a set of techniques used to place your website higher up on Search Engine results pages. The higher up you appear, the more likely you are to have people visiting your site in greater numbers.
Below are a few general SEO rules which may help your site improve its ranking:
URL Structure
Having a well-structured URL (page address) can help search engines understand more about a page than an unstructured URL. For example this URL:
www.cybermill.co.uk/services/logo-design-branding/
tells us the visitor and the search engine that this page is a service from the Cybermill offering logo design and branding. Having a good hierarchy in your URL structure can help a search engine know what the page is about without having to process all the content.
Some examples of bad URLs:
- www.example.co.uk/title/tt0984562876
- www.example.com/p?=235
The above give no information to the user or the search engine about what the page will contain.
Other SEO that are related to the URL are the URL length and keyword location. Shorter URLS can perform better in search results, and are more likely to be copied, pasted and linked to than longer URLs. This is partly because a long URL can seem ‘spammy’ to Google. Also the closer your keyword is to the start of the address the better – so you might find ‘www.york-websites-cybermill.co.uk’ would do better than ‘www.the-cybermill-business-servcies-websites-york.co.uk’ when searching for ‘website design York’.
Hyphens rank better than underscores when it comes to separating words (but you shouldn’t really use hyphens for your main web address).
Meta Data
Page Titles
The page title is the name that will appear on the browsers menu bar, the name that will appear when your site is bookmarked and most importantly the name and link that will appear on all search engine results pages.
The title is often the first impression that your company or website will have on a prospective visitor, so getting it right for your target audience really is a must. It is also a good idea for your page title to include the name of your organisation.
The best page titles are a few words in length or a short phrase and contain the keywords that are most relevant to the page. It is often best to have these keywords near the start of the title. A good size for a title would be 60-65 characters, including spaces and punctuation; Google uses the first 66 characters of the page title on its results pages, while Yahoo uses 120 characters. It is also important that each page have its own unique title.
An optimal format would be for a page title would be:
Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Company Name
It is thought that page titles are the second most important factor to consider in on-page SEO, after your content.
Meta Descriptions
This is the description that you see on the search engine results underneath the page title. These are very important in encouraging clicks from visitors – they should inform and describe the page. Google announced in 2009 that it no longer factored Meta Descriptions or Meta keywords in its algorithm.
Having a relevant and succinct page description will however encourage the user to choose your link over others, resulting in a higher rate of click-throughs. Again the description being unique to the page will also help. Although a description can be any size, it is best to keep your Meta descriptions down to between 150-160 characters in length, as many search engine pages do not show beyond this.
Schema or ‘Micro Data’
These are additional tags added to the HTML (specifically HTML 5) of a site which tell the search engine more information about the content within the tags.
Google, Bing and Yahoo! have agreed to support the use of Micro Data, in hope that it will produce more relevant and detailed search results.
Using Micro Data gives the search engine bot more context around the page content, helping it to refine which search results it should rank for. Using Micro Data also allows you to use ‘Rich Snippets’, which display more information on the results pages than a normal listing would.
More information about Schema and meta data can be found at http://schema.org/
Site map
Having an HTML or human accessible sitemap will help your visitors find their way around. Search engines especially like ‘XML’ sitemaps – these are specially formatted maps of the site pages that can be read quickly by a bot. When using an XML site map you can enter more information about the page – for example when the page was last updated.
XML sitemaps can also be submitted to Google so if your site is new or has been substantially updated, submitting this to Google will help your site be indexed/re-indexed more quickly.
Content
The most important factor when it comes to on-page SEO practices is the actual page content. There really isn’t a point in having a website if it doesn’t have content – this is what the visitor came to see and ultimately it is what makes a site worthy of appearing in search results.
So what makes good content? From a search engine point of view good content must supply a demand and must be linkable.
Keyword research
To get your website coming up for the right searches it needs to contain the right words – which we call ‘keywords’.
When researching keywords you could start by putting yourself in your visitors’ shoes. Think about what you would type into a search engine to find your site – then do a search for these terms. Are the sites that appear at the top in the same industry as you? Are they your competitors?
Using an analytics tool such as Google Analytics can help you determine which keywords people are already searching for. Using phrases as keywords can also help, as not everyone will search for a single word. Being specific will also help, as the more specific you are the less competition there is for the keyword.
Content, keyword density and content length
It is impossible to know the exact amount of keywords repetitions you can use on a page before the search engines will catch on to what you are doing. Too little and you won’t rank well, too much and your copy will look ridiculous. A good rule of thumb is to use your key phrases in the headings of the page – and always ensure that your text makes sense.
The age of a page and the frequency with which it is updated also holds some weight with search engines as the more frequently the page is updated the more a search engine will revisit. Making sure that your site is up to date is also beneficial for the visitors to your site.
Having a page which is either too long in length or too short is disliked by many search engines, it seems that longer than 200 words but less than 1000 is a good length for both the user and the search engine (though this does of course depend a lot on what you have on the page).
Duplicated content will affect your search engine results negatively. Having duplicate information out there on the web provides the search bots with a quandary – which is more relevant to the search term? Search engines will rarely show both options and are forced to choose, if yours is the one discarded then your page will not rank. Making sure your site has unique content, even from page to page, is the best practice for your site.
Body Tags
In HTML there a certain tags given to headings – for example the most important heading on the page should be in the ‘H1’ tag, the next most important in ‘H2’ and so on until you reach your paragraph text which is always in ‘P’ tags. Web designers use these tags to help style a heading and semantically lay out a page; however search engines also pay attention to these headings, assigning more importance to what is in a ‘H1’ than a ‘H2’.
Italic / Emphasised and Bold / Strong text
It is suggested that using your keyword once in bold and once in italics can help your site to perform. Bold and italic text are more visible to your visitors, and so the search engines will also take a little more notice.
Image SEO
Images should appropriate ‘ALT’ tags. These are displayed when the image cannot be loaded (for one reason or another) – and for visitors using screen readers. The tag should describe the image, but can also be used to add some important keywords. Using keywords within the image filename can also add weight to the page’s SEO.
On the other side of the coin, using images as text is a very bad idea. Not only does this mean that the text is no longer accessible to those who use screen readers, it is no longer accessible to the search engines, who can’t ‘see’ images like they do text.
Flash
Flash content can be indexed by the search bots, but it doesn’t do this particularly well. The content will lack structure and, depending on how it’s been put together, might be missing information entirely. Using flash entirely on a site or as an introductory home page will normally impede your search engine results.
Internal Links
The more a page is linked to on a site the more value it is given by the search engines. The location of this link is also of importance. Google and other search engines give more importance to links that are found within the page content and less to those found in the footer or sidebars. Therefore if you want a page to rank better it may be advisable to place a link to it in the header or in the body content. The anchor text (i.e. what the link says) is also important – but not as important of that on an external link on another website.
Navigation
In terms of the structure of your website it’s always a good idea to keep things simple. How many clicks does it take to reach your important pages? If you make your pages hard to get to they won’t carry as much value to the search engines – or to your visitors! If you want a page to to rank well then you should make it easily accessible – if possible directly from the main menu on all pages.
Making sure that your website is in good working order and that there are no broken links, hidden content or old/broken code will also help your site. If a search bot can’t see it, it doesn’t know that it’s there.
Conclusion
The above is just an overview of the best on page SEO techniques that are available. There are many more factors to consider both for on page and off page optimisation, but hopefully the above will get you started.
