Website Design & Development  

Traffic from search engines is crucial to the majority of companies who have websites today and this fact has led to the emergence of an entire industry dedicated to the search engine optimisation of websites. Depending on who you talk to within this industry there will be various methods recommended to get you high rankings but there are a few fundamental steps that will help your web site gain good rankings.

Many webpages that you see on the internet have been optimised for a number of keywords or phrases. This is a mistake. Target only one or two specific keywords per page. This means that you can focus on that particular phrase or keyword and write readable, and more importantly, relevant content.

Make sure that links back to your site include your keywords by adding them to the title tag. Many of the bigger search engines are now taking notice of the words used in links to your site.

Place your keyword in the heading on your page. Many search engines consider the heading as being more important than the rest of your content, after all, it should be the attention grabber! If the <h1> is too large for your site then you can use style sheets to format it accordingly.

In the source code of every page there are title and description tags which help the search engines understand what your page is about. Use these tags to promote your keyword or phrase. The content of the title tag is what is shown in the listings provided by the search engines. Also insert your keyword into the description tag. These also appear in any results provided by the search engines so a good description can encourage searchers to visit your site.

Write keyword rich copy. Your copy should be between 300 and 500 words long to satisfy the search engines. Ensure that your keywords appear at the beginning and end of your copy and a few times in the middle as well. Search engines usually focus on content at the beginning of the page so its important to make sure that keyword rich copy appears high on the page.

Following the above steps will help ensure that your site receives the best rankings possible and any search engine optimisation campaign should include them.