Web Design News

I was asked today to take a look at a site for a local engineering company, they wanted to know why their site was getting very little traffic from the main search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo). A quick look revealed that, even though the site had been live for 3 years, there had been very little optimisation done in all that time.

I gave them a detailed report into the reasons why I felt they were struggling to rank in search engines. Here are 5 quick tips to help make sure your site is ready for search engines, bear in mind these are basic steps and there are a lot more things you can do to improve your search engine rankings.

1. Title Tags - <title>These are title tags</title>
Title tags are in the head of your website and show up in the blue bar at the top of your web browser as well as the title for your site in the search engine results page. Make sure that the keywords you are targeting are in your title tags (but do not stuff every keyword as it will look spammy and decrease potential visitor click through rates)

Far too many business websites are guilty of not utilising their title tags properly and have things like “index”, “Home” or their company name which are not helpful for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.

2. Your Internal Links Are Important Too
When linking to pages on your site from other pages on your site, make sure your internal links are using descriptive keywords. Instead of saying “click here” or “find out more”. Use a keyword relevant to that page “Web Design Services“, etc.

3. Have Good Content
Search engines love good, descriptive content just as much as human visitors do. A lot of business websites are very sparce when it comes to actual content. Service and product pages should be as descriptive as possible and contain their relevant keywords.

4. Keep Your Site Updated
Adding fresh content on a regular basis is a very good way to help increase search engine visibility, things like “Company News” or “Company Blog” are a great addition to business websites and should be kept up to date with regular new content.

5. Get Good Quality Links
A site without links is not going to rank well in the search engines, it is imperitive that you begin building backlinks to your site from relevant sources. Try to think quality over quantity and relevance is a key factor. Steer clear of companies that offer to submit your site to “1000+ search engines” or offer to give your “thousands of links for £99″ they are often very poor quality, rarely relevant to your website’s content and could end up causing more harm than good.