Introduction
Search engines have become part of the daily lives of most internet users. The purpose is of course to help you find content and websites relevant to your search enquiry, as a business owner or webmaster you want to drive people to your website. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about trying to aid your listing at being shown at the top of search results (also known as increasing your PR or Page Ranking).
All search engines utilise algorithms to calculate a webpage's relevancy to a search definition, all search engines will have a slightly different formulae.
Natural and Artificial Optimisation
The search engines' aim is to provide results for your search that satisfy what you are looking for, natural optimisation is all about improving your website's content increasing relevancy and ensuring your website is search engine friendly so it can scan your content easily and without hiccups. Artificial SEO is when you utilise the formulae to increase your listing, which while worthwhile doing can become less effective if the engines alter their formulae.
Top Tips
There is a long list of things you can do to help improve your page rank, we have included some tips that we recommend doing.
- Page Titles
In your HTML you should find <title> and </title> tags, between these tags is where you insert your page title. Page titles are often shown at the top of a browser and normally the default title when someone bookmarks your page. Most people choose to include their company name in the title, but we recommend also including the title for that page too. This helps a search engine define what your page is about when indexing it.
- Alt Titles for Images
Search engines are very good at scanning text on webpages but generally not very good with indexing and understanding images. To aid search engines in indexing your website it is strongly recommended that all images are given an ALT reference, this is text for if the image can't be shown/read. An example of this would be:
<img src="http://www.honeygraphics.com/images/title/privacy.jpg" alt="Privacy Policy and Cookies">
- Avoid Flash and Javascript Menus
Search engines map your website by clicking all your links to see where links go and to discover your entire domain. Search Engines struggle to index content and links in Flash and Javascript. Both element types can be beneficial to the look and feel of the website, so if you do feel it is essential please ensure you have text links somewhere on the page for spiders (the computers that search engines use to walk the web and index content) to follow.
- Contextual Hyperlinks
It's always beneficial to try and make links contextual for both users and spiders. So if your target is "Price List", then link to "Price List" instead of "Click Here".
More Tips Coming Soon...
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