Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tips

1. Content – ‘Content is king’ – ensuring your content has regular, up-to-date and unique quality content is vital for high search engine rankings.
2. Links – Links, both internal and external help map out the importance of various pages on your sites and increases its reputation in the eyes of search engine spiders.
   1. External link popularity – External link to your pages help boost recognition of your website and helps define the keywords which are associated with your site and each individual page.
   2. Internal link structure – The internal page links are very important to defining the overall structure of your site and the site wide important of the pages.
3. Code optimisation – The optimisations of website code can increase the rate and reliability at which search engines spider your website and can assist in emphasising the most important content on your web-pages.

Content

The common and highly cliché phrase relating to web-page and media content is ‘Content is king’ and that is certainly true in terms of search engine optimisation. Quantity and quality are both highly important in terms of SEO, along with the originality of articles also being highly important. In many cases, non-original or copied articles can be penalised in the search engine rankings due to duplicate content penalties.

Links

Linking is very important for search engine optimisation, with external inbound links being one of the most important and fundamentally measurements search engines use to verify and represent the overall importance of any individual web-page and website.

External Link Popularity

In the main categories list above, both the external link popularity and internal link structure are mentioned. In relation to external link popularity, each search engine utilises its own measures. The most noticeable and well known of these is Google’s Page Rank features. Page Rank indicates the importance of a page according to the Google Search engine, it uses number/popularity of inbound links, global rankings and other measures to determine this value via a proprietary algorithm held secret by Google themselves.

Internal Link Structure

In addition to the highly important external back link popularity, the internal link structure of your website is very important. The most important pages on your websites should be linked to from all other pages. Typically, this is done via a header, sidebar or navigation in the footer. If  you are relying on Flash or JavaScript buttons in many parts of your site, ensure that text links (that search engines can easily spider) are also included to compliment these, either within a navigation bar or the page footers. In the same way that you should utilise important content-related keywords in external back link link text, these keywords should also be present in internal links as well to ensure search engines know the subjects and topics each of you web-pages relate to.

Code Optimisation

Code optimisation, in the context of search engine optimisation, refers to many improvements that developers can make to the HTML structure of a website. One of the most important changes that can be made is making code compliant with W3C standards, ensuring search engine spiders can easily navigate through and extract contents from web-pages. Additionally, web-page content can be rearranged to put main keyword rich page content towards the top of the page code, ensuring it is the first part of the page which is seen when search engines spider the pages. Reducing the code to content ratio can also be quite important in making sites easier  to read by search engine spiders.

Another optimisation, which is in dispute regarding its importance now is the use of META tags. Dependant on the search engine spider itself, META tags containing keywords and description information, are used to varying degrees. It is commonly believed that Google utilises META tag content to a very small degree in determining the search engine results rankings, whilst other search engines such as Yahoo Search and Microsoft Bing have relied on these tags very heavily in the past.

More Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tips

If you’re after some more, high quality, search engine optimisation tips or advice, for your websites, or in general, please feel free to contact us or read about some of our search engine optimisation services.