Optimisation Tips
Optimising a website is not rocket science but it can be very time consuming and there are no guarantees of results.
A few simple optimisation rules that should be applied to any website. Follow these basics and youwill be well on the way to a decent ranking.
Page Text
The text on each page should be long enough for search engines to determine the context - ideally 100 - 200 words.
Put the most relevant content at the top of the page.
Include your key words and phrases throughout your page text.
Use heading tags (H1 to H6) for main and sub headings and include key words and phrases as your headings
Content
Give every page its own clear context and purpose so that search engines give each page a good relevance score for its keywords
Links
Link to other parts of your website using relevant text links.
Get other highly ranked sites to link to you - again using text links that include your keywords.
Avoid Flash navigation as search engines cannot read the text or follow the links.
If you do use Flash make sure you also include plain text links somewhere on the page.
Structure
Where possible, avoid using tables in the design of your pages. Instead try to use stylesheets. This makes the code easier for search engines to read and makes the text flow better.
Code and Stylesheets
If you use JavaScript in your page, make sure that the code is written in an external file and linked in the head section of your page - this limits content that search engines regard as irrelevant as well as being good practice for maintaining your code.
Interactivity
Search engines like to see a high level of interactivity on a website e.g. a search facility, forms for users to fill in to submit information etc.
Meta data
Each of the pages in your site should have different meta data that should be relevant to that page. Meta data is the Title, Keywords & Description that appears in the HTML of the page but is not seen in the web browser.
Title - Keep the title short, relevant and include the main key words for your page.
Keywords - keywords and phrases that apply to the page. Try to keep this down to about 14 words or phrases.
Description - Keep this to under 160 charachers and make it relevant to the page.
Images
Use images on your pages and make sure they have relevant names.
Use ALT tags to describe each picture, again try to use relevant keywords and phrases.
Flash
Avoid flash, particularly full-screen Flash intros. These are seen by search engines as dead-ends as they cannot follow the links or read any of the Flash content.
