Basics of Search Engine Optimisation

Posted by EssexMax on 9 July 2010 under Search Engine, The Basics | 2 Comments to Read

Looking to optimise your website, but not sure where to start?

The Essex Max site contains pages of advice on ways to optimise your website, and tools to make life easier. On this page, we’ll give you a high-level set of topics to bear in mind when thinking of trying to get your site to perform better with the search engines.

Search Engine Listing:

The big name in the search engine game is obviously Google, with Microsoft’s Bing nipping on Google’s heels. Make sure your website site is listed in both. If you’re not listed, submit your site ASAP:

• Submit your site to Google
• Submit your site to Bing

Know Your Audience

It’s vital to have a good feel for who visits your site, and what they’re looking for.

Use of site logs and monitoring tools can be a great help in making sure you understand what your visitors are searching for, as well as working out which parts of your site perform well, or need fine tuning. You will need to be familiar with your website’s stats package.

It’s also a good idea to consider using the free Google Analytics package.

For more, see Webstats Basics

Understand where you rank

Use some of the various tools out there to find out how well your site is currently performing. Things to keep an eye on:

• Domain Rankings
• The Page Rank of your main pages
• Top keywords, and how well they are performing
• Links – How many sites link to you

Understand what search engines want

These days, engines like Google and Bing are clever. Don’t try to cheat the system. Instead, make sure your site is easy to navigate, free of site errors, and that your content is fresh, relevant and popular content.

Your strategy

Set yourself a clear target .i.e. “get 3 new incoming links a week”, “increase site hits by 5% a month”, “rank my keywords in the Top Ten”. Then, plan how to hit that target.

Planning Your Strategy

Make sure your pages are free from serious errors, and are correctly optimised – Validate your pages, check your tags, use a Spider Simulator.

Make sure your pages are relevant, on-topic, and look good for both humans and robots

Keywords – What would you like your top keywords to be? What are your top keywords? Why do your keywords rank higher on competitor sites?

Links – Inbound links from reputable websites are key. Look at link-building – Directories, relevant blogs and discussion groups, article publishing, sticky content

Track and monitor your progress regularly, using the various SEO tools

Site Links

Links are key to getting a good listing. You need to get relevant incoming links to your site.

Understand your visitors

 

Want more help?

Have a browse of our SEO Topics, consider attending our course, or look for a good SEO book.