Margin Media

Search Engine Optimisation...

We all have heard about it, but do you really know what it is all about and how it will benefit your business?

Search Engine Optimisation is one of the key essentials in having a successful website. It is the continued process of improving a websites content to increase quality of traffic from search engines via natural (“a.k.a organic") listings. The better your website is optimised the greater the chances are that it will be picked up by a search engine, which in turn drives more traffic to your site.

That is all very well, but the main question is... How do I optimise my website so I rank better on search engines?

With 5 basic SEO techniques you can be well on your way to your online domination via search engines!

These techniques involve:

1. Metadata Elements: Implement relevant unique metadata for all of your pages. This includes the meta keywords, meta description, page title <title></title>, meta link relationship and meta robots tags.
2. Create A Sitemap + Submit: An XML sitemap is an essential part of your website. Generate an XML sitemap and submit it to all the major search engines (Google, YAHOO, ASK, Bing etc.). This helps for search engines to better crawl your website. As well as this another useful technique is to create a HTML sitemap, (on larger sites just use the main pages, while on smaller sites add every page). This helps to create a HUB like area for the search engines to crawl and find all your pages, but also provides users an area to quickly go to, to find the key page they are looking for.
3. Target Unique Keywords: Target the main competitive keyword on your homepage while targeting less competitive, more unique keywords, on inner pages. As most unknowingly web masters target the same keywords across their entire site they are losing key traffic to their site via the search engines.
4. Correct Use of <h1>, <h2>, <h3>.. Tags: <h1> and <h2> tags should be used to wrap the main couple of keywords of each page. As search engines give alot of weighting to these tags it is important to keep it to the 2-3 words in each page. With the main keywords in the <h1></h1> tags and the secondary keywords in <h2></h2>. After this subheadings etc. should be used with relevant <h3></h3> tags.
5. Use Bold, Italic and Underline: Another proven method has been appropriately using the Bold, italic and underline styles. As search engines tend to given a stronger weighting over the keywords with these styles.

That’s it for now! If you haven’t been using any of these techniques, it would be a great idea to start now as your site could be losing valuable traffic from search engines. And remember that this is an ongoing process, this isn’t something you just do once and it is all fine. If you really want to stay ahead of your competitors you have to stay on top of your game and frequently add fresh content and continue implementing the above techniques to greater improve your website.

For more information, or to have your website optimised, check out our webpage on Search Engine Optimistion.