Optimising Your Website for Search Engines

1. Have Unique Title Tags

A few hours spent writing unique titles and descriptions for each page of your site is insignificant compared to the increase in traffic that results, Additionally, using keywords in your Title tags further boosts each page’s calculated relevance to a particular subject.

2. Write A Compelling Meta Description

Page titles tell the search engines what your site is about, and meta descriptions give searchers something compelling to click on in the search engine results pages.

3. A Content Rich Website

Keyword density is the number of occurrences of targeted keyword in the content of the page. Having a content rich website with your targeted keywords occurring naturally within the text every 300 – 400 words helps your website perform better on major search engines.

4. Write Articles

Writing and posting article is an effective way to get targeting traffic to your website

5. Use a robots.txt File

Every good crawler looks for a robots.txt file in your root directory. I would highly recommend creating a valid robots.txt just to appease these search engines.

6. ALT Tags

Every image should have an ALT tag. Use a keyword rich description of what the image is. If the image contains text use the text in the image. This is also a usability/accessibility tool.

7. Get Relevant Links to Your Site

Put relevant non-competitive links on your site first then email them requesting a reciprocal link.

8. Submit Google And Yahoo Sitemaps

Google and Yahoo both provide the a facility to submit a site map directly to the search engine which then allows the spiders to crawl all pages of the site quickly and easily.

9. HTML Site Map

You should create a site map that links to the major sections and sub-sections of your Web site. The site map should be linked to from your Web site's home page at the very least. Preferably the site map should be linked to from every page. Recommend file names for your site map are "sitemap.html" or "site-map.html."

10. Manually Submit Your Site To The Search Engines

By submitting your site directly to the major search engines tells them “Hey, we’ve got a website, would you like to crawl it”

11. Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text used to link to a page. Using keywords in anchor text is a very good idea and will improve a page's performance in SERPs.

12. File/Directory Names Using Keywords

Your filenames and directory names should contain keywords. If your page is about car insurance then the filename should be car-insurance.

13. Hyphens

Use hyphens ( - ) and not underscores ( _ ) to separate words in directory and file names. Most search engines parse a hyphen like a reader would parse a space. Using underscores makes what_we_do look like whatwedo to most search engines. You should definitely separate words in your URLs.

14. Get Paid inclusion to Google and Yahoo

Paid inclusion is a quick and easy way to get to the top of search engine rankings.

15. Include Your URL At The End Of All Emails

A simple yet effective strategy is to place your Website URL at the end of each and every email you send

16. Make an Email Announcement to Your Client List

Email your current list of clients telling them about your new website.