Web Design, SEO and Business Articles

This article introduces you to the basics of search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is a two-step process. The first step involves understanding how search engines view websites. The second step is using this knowledge to optimise your site so that it appears in the first few entries for a specific search. Essentially those are the two main steps in search engine optimisation.

How search engines work

Search engines provide access to the information available on the Internet. A search engine uses three basic mechanisms:

Discovery – this is how search engines find websites. The discovery process is performed by a piece of software, known as a bot, spider or crawler, which searches through web links.

Storage – this is where links, page summaries, and related information on websites are stored. The servers that hold this information are known as index servers.

Ranking – the ranking system is used to evaluate how important web pages are.

To effectively optimise a website you will need a good understanding of Discovery, Storage and Ranking.

Discovery

Search engines need to discover your website before they can index it. If you want the bot to easily find your website, you need inbound links to your site. Inbound links are links on existing websites that when clicked take the user to your website. When your website is discovered the search engine will store information on your site.

Storage

The search engine’s bot gathers and stores information on your website by indexing the words on the home page and following all the links to determine the pages that make up the site and the words on the pages. As well as the words on the pages the bot examines the meta tags in the sites code. Meta tags are given special consideration by search engines when finding out the nature of your website.

There are a variety of meta tags but the most relevant for SEO are the description meta tag and the keywords meta tag. The “keywords” meta tag lets you list key words, relevant to the content of your site, separated by commas. The key words to include are those you would expect a user to type into the search engine when they are trying to find the information your site provides. For example a web design website may use the following keywords:

web design, web site, SEO

The description meta tag is where you enter a description of your site that tells the search engine what your website is all about. For example:

Web Design Scotland

The search engine stores the information it discovers about your site, so when a person enters a query, the search engine searches its information store and returns a list of sites it thinks are relevant.

Ranking

When search engines return the relevant results for a query, they use a sites rank to determine the order in which to displays the results. Google uses the PageRank algorithm to determine a sites rank. The exact nature of how the PageRank algorithm works is secret, but it is alleged that Google’s page rank is based on more than 100 variables. Although the main concept is, a page ranks more highly based on the number websites linking to it, and the higher these sites rank the more weight their link is given.

Making things easy for the search engines

Now that you have a basic understanding of how search engines work, you can take steps to promote your website. The place to start is with your website design.

Designing with SEO in mind

The text is far more important than fancy graphics where SEO is concerned. Although the visual design of your site is important when the people get there. When creating a website that is search engine friendly the first thing to remember is people use the Internet to find information. If your site has no useful information then people will have no reason to visit. When writing the content of your site, find out the key words that people will use to find your site and use them in the text, but remember that the text must still makes sense.

When you have created good informative content, then you can consider the navigation and links. For linking, text is also more important than graphics. Use text or a combination of text and a graphic for links. Links using graphics only can be difficult for search engines to spot.

Getting your site listed

If your site has a number of inbound links from high traffic websites then it likely that your site will get listed on the search engines without to much trouble. If you have just designed a new site, the first step is to manually submit your site to the search engines. You can manually add a your site to Google by going to http://www.google.com/addurl/. When you have submitted your site to the search engines the next step is to get it listed on directories.

Directories work in a similar way to the yellow pages; they list your site under a specific category. There are a number of directories where you can submit your site. Some directories will charge for a listing, but others are free. Getting your site listed by a directory provides a link back to your site, and so improves your search engine ranking.

Another way to increase links to your site is reciprocal linking. This is where you offer to add a link from your website, to a site with content that compliments your site, and in return you ask that site’s Webmaster for a link back to your site.

Adding fresh content to your website

Continually adding fresh content is important for keeping your search engine ranking. Popular ways of doing this are adding a blog, articles page or a news page to your website. Then frequently updating these pages with fresh content. The search engines will check your site every month or so and when they do they will find the new content.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.