Simple Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tips

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of those terms that has a shroud of mystery around it for most people. SEO companies can baffle you with terminology and statistics to convince you of the neccessity of their services. If you are a large business, you most certainly do need to utilise an SEO company. But for most small businesses, the $1,000's of dollars SEO companies charge is not only prohibitive, it is also largely not necessary.

In a nutshell, SEO is the process of moving your website up the search engine rankings - the ultimate goal being to be the number 1 listing on a page when people search for your business type. There are many ways to assist this to happen WITHOUT spending lots of (or nil) money. These include:

• Designing your website in a search-friendly manner (eg sites created entirely in Flash or with a high proportion of embedded text won't be read by search engines)
• Include keywords and phrases (in both your page content, page descriptions/keywords). You should include as many as you can think of in the "keyword" section of your site (this is the "background" info that you don't see but search engines do) - be sure to include variations, plurals, phrases and any words you think people might possibly use to find your website.
• Build relationships with other website owners with whom you can arrange reciprocal links (i.e. where your website link is on their site and theirs is on yours). This increases the level of "trust" search engines have in your website. Make sure these links are on websites that relate or compliment yours (eg wedding celebrant and florist). These links are also important for generating traffic to your site (i.e. people looking for a wedding celebrant are also likely to be looking for a florist).
• Include your website in online directories (there are many free listings available)

Once you have all these things in place, the job doesn't end there! You need to keep track of your website statistics to see which keywords people have used to find you, whether traffic is increasing overall, which links people have clicked on from other sites and so on. It can take afew months to notice a difference in your search engine rankings, so don't expect results overnight.

Here are some other simple ways to increase your search engine ranking:

• Write articles for online publishers - most of these sites archive their articles. The links stay live often for many years in their archives and keep providing a link back to your site.
• Article exchanges. Link exchanges used to be the "done thing" but are now generally useless. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else's article with a link back to their site. They publish your article with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links.
• Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers. (ask your web designer for assistance with this if you're not sure this is done on your site)

So what DOES Google use to detemine search rankings? The text/content on your website pages (the text you can actually read, not hidden in the code). This means you need to work extra hard to really hone your content to not only accurately and logically describe your product/service to users, but also to include as many "keywords" as you can. AND - regularly updated content is still paramount so that Google can see your website has something new and relevant to search for.

Google also provides Webmaster guidelines with very useful information and tools. Here are afew key points:

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
  
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
  
• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
  
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
  
• Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.

For more information, go to Google Webmaster Guidelines (highly recommended!)

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