Key Steps of SEO

Search Engine Optimisation basics

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and why do I need it?

SEO is the process of making your website appear higher up the search results page for a search that is relevant to the content of your website. The reason you need it is that without it very few people are likely to know that your website exists. The good news is that you can do a lot of the SEO work yourself, without having to pay a lot of money to an SEO specialist.

The following are the key steps in optimising your website for search engines.

Choosing Your Keyword/Keyphrase

Keywords or keyphrases are the terms that people are likely to use in a search engine query to find your website. To determine what these are, you need to consider the purpose of your website and note the words and phrases that best describe it. Phrases are better than single words, as they are more likely to differentiate yourself from similar websites.

To test how much competition there is for your chosen keyphrases, key them into Google, surrounded by quotation marks. The phrases with fewer results have less competition and so would result in a higher ranking for your page. However, don't make your phrase too specific, since it is unlikely that anyone would ever use it in a search.

Keyphrase Optimisation

Once you've chosen your phrases, you need to place them strategically within each page. Some of the best places to put your keyphrases are:

• In the page title
• In headings
• In links
• In bold
• At the start and, to a lesser extent, end of the page
• In the keyword and description meta tags

It is important that you use your keyphrases frequently within your page. When writing the content for your website you may find this difficult, as you try to balance the readability of your text with the need to repeat these key phrases.

To keep your search engine ranking high, you'll also need to update the text within your site at regular intervals. If a search engine "robot" sees that your site has not changed since it's last visit, it will reduce the frequency of it's future visits. Less visitsby the search engines will result in a lower page ranking. Also, human visitors will be less likely to want to return to your site if they don't think there will be anything new to look at. A site with interesting content that is regularly updated will attract visitors.

Search Engine Friendly Navigation

The following tips will help to ensure that your website can be navigated easily by search engines:

• Use text for links as much as possible, rather than images. If you do use images, make sure there are text links on the page as well.
• Avoid frames, Flash and JavaScript as much as possible.
• Ensure that all pages link to the home page.
• Don't make any pages too long or too short and try to keep them focused.

Inbound Links

The final ways to get your website noticed is to get links from the best web directories and from other relevant, quality websites. The major search engines crawl the web, following links from page to page. Any link to a page on your website makes a search engine rate your page higher. The more links that you have from quality websites the higher your search engine ranking will be. Read the Submitting to Web Directories article for more information.