Optimise for Visibility

Website optimisation, also termed search engine optimisation – or SEO, is absolutely crucial to the long term success of your website. There seems to be no point in pursuing website development, no matter how good it looks, if it can’t be found by anyone but you. Optimisation is the process of preparing your site – as efficiently as you possibly can, so that people will find it during a search.

Assuming that people aren’t aware of the existence of your site, how do you change this? One of the primary ways of approaching this problem is to design your site in such a manner that the so-called “robots” agree that it’s a good source of information relating to the keywords in question. An individual who’s searching will usually type in a phrase that has to do with his or her particular problem, and it’s then the responsibility of Google, Yahoo or MSN to retrieve the most relevant selections. These companies employ complex algorithms within their powerful search database, based on information that their robots find when they crawl through each and every website in the known universe. These algorithms are automated processes and they utilise proprietary methods which these companies will not disclose.

An entire industry has been built up around search engine optimisation for online business. There are many experts and those who purport to know what it takes to optimise your site efficiently. Whilst there are many gray areas still in existence, there are a number of fundamentals that you have to bear in mind.

Before you even think about designing your website, you should have chosen and purchased a domain name which goes along with your products or services. Ideally, the domain name should contain your keywords within it, which are really just phrases or single words that specifically describe your products and services; for instance, “article writing services” or “East Bay chiropractor.” Remember, in most cases it’s to your benefit to optimise your website according to your specific location, in addition to your particular field of professional expertise.

Once you have selected your keywords, you should optimise one page for each selected keyword. You can have hundreds of keywords if you choose, but you should make sure that you conduct careful research in every case. As you’re hoping that your website will appear in the search results when somebody types in “East Bay chiropractor”, for example, you need to try and make sure that the robots interpret your page as relevant to this phrase. Therefore, they must see the exact keyword phrase in the page title, in the description of the page and in the meta-tags.
The content within your web page should be informative and very relevant to your keyword, and it should contain the keyword a certain number of times; most people recommend a 1% density. Don’t forget that your website must be readable when visited, and there is nothing worse than what is called “keyword stuffing”, where web masters try and include a relevant keyword too many times within an article, severely affecting its readability. Technically speaking, the keywords should also appear in a related “alt” tag attached to each photograph or image on the site, and filenames referenced from within the site should also contain the keyword. Furthermore, a clear internal linking framework should contain, once again, your relevant keywords.

Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be particularly difficult, but you should pay careful attention to it. If you try to rank for “long tail” keywords (a more precise description of your product or service), and especially if you try to geo-target the audience, you’ll stand a pretty good chance of ranking well within the search engine pages for your terms.