ARTICLES - How to Optimise a Website

First, you need to make sure there is content on each page, text that people can read and also the search engine spiders.

The information on each page, the text, is used to find relevant keywords and key phrases about your product or service, this is where you need to do some keyword research to find exactly what people type into a search engine to find your product or service and if these keywords are not on your page, they need to be added in the correct places throughout the text.

Say for example, you sell used forklifts, we will use the word forklifts to see what people search for, this will tell us what people actually type in, of course they use the term “used forklifts”, but there will be other key phrases.

Here is just an example, “gas forklifts”, “electric forklifts”, “second hand forklifts”, “caterpillar forklifts”, “used forklifts in Coventry” etc.

We decide on the most appropriate words for your web page, these words then have to be used within the content of the page and also in the meta tags, you cannot simply use your keywords in your meta tags OR the page text, they have to be in both.

The Meta Tags are the first part the search engines will read, firstly, it’s the Title tag, then the description tag and then the keyword tag, the search engine spider then reads through your page, in the source code, and has to match up what’s in your meta tags with the content (text), that is on your page, these four elements are critical.

It's common knowledge that pages built entirely in flash or those that just have a series of images will not rank as well as pages that have plenty of relevant content, because as everyone knows, content is king.

Another important optimising technique is to encourage other websites who sell a similar product or service, (but not the same as yours), to link back to your website.

The most common are reciprocal links, often referred to as link exchange where you have a link to their site and they have a link to yours, the best way to go is to just get other sites to link to yours without giving a link back.

A big mistake with many websites is that they have the same title and Meta tags on every single page, such an easy fix that will make a big difference to your rankings.

Another big mistake is that some websites use navigational links that can’t be followed by a search engine spider, or bot, the easy fix for this is to add a textual site map, the best option is to use search engine friendly navigation.

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