Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

NOTE: The Pink Mayhem guides are intended to be introductory rather than exhaustive - please contact us if you wish to know more.

Many companies offer to get your site in the top 10 of search engine rankings, this cannot be guaranteed. Cramming and hiding text and other quick fix techniques are likely get your site ignored by search engines. It is better to develop your site ethically, that is far more likely to increase traffic to your site.

A well constructed website should be a useful and pleasant experience for visitors and it should be enabled so that search engines can find their way around, this ability will improve your sites rankings.

SEO is best thought of as a process that determines many elements of your site, the most important criteria are listed here:

Domain Name

Acquire a domain name that is brief, memorable and relevant to the topic of the site, it's a good idea to do this first, three months in advance of launching your site if possible. Make a holding page - search engines are suspicious of new sites and this will help to get your site established.

Links

Links are probably the most important factors in SEO:

Link around your own site - Links should be topical, useful to the user and not over-used.

Outbound Links - Link to other sites wisely - over use can be detrimental to your site's rankings.

Inbound Links - These can have a very positive impact on your site's rankings and can drive traffic to your site, inbound links build trust in the algorithms of the search engine. It is worth pursing links from your suppliers, distributors and clients and business partners.

Keywords

Keywords are the building blocks of any site and spending time on Keyword Research is worthwhile.

There are many, often free tools to help you do this, Wordtracker and The Google AdWords Keyword Tool are two - a quick search will find that there are several more.

Keywords should help you to decide:

• your domain name
• page names and titles
• page descriptions
• links within the site
• how you write your content

You need to aim to have as many keywords used on the page as possible - without cramming or over use - the text of course has to make sense and be useful to your visitors. Aim for 5-10 keywords or phrases that are also in your page content.

Content

Create as much content about your products or subject as you can.

Create the first heading on your page so that it best describes the content and be sure to use it as the page title.

Think about your target audience and write the content accordingly, write your content concisely, using keywords and phrases learnt from keyword research, that is, write paragraphs ensuring the appropriate phrases incorporating your keywords are used - without cramming your content with keywords as that may have a detrimental effect.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are in the part of the page that is not displayed in your browser but they are useful to search engines, there are many different types of meta tags, your web company will be able to advise and add these for you if you are not comfortable with HTML. The meta tags we generally need to be concerned with are:

Title

The title of the page should be relevant to its content; it also appears in the browser bar, top left, and is the first line you see in the search engine listing when you carry out a search and so is useful in helping us to decide which listing to follow. This should be no more than 64 characters long, avoid words such as, am, an, and, are, as, at, by, of, this, that, the, we, you - instead fill the limited amount of characters with your keywords.

TIP: If you are a Word user - from the Tools menu select Word Count and you will see a dialogue box detailing the amount of words and characters in your document.

Description

This should be a succinct sentence summarising the content of the page; this is the second line you will see in the search engine listing when you carry out a search and so offers very useful information to us and is likely to affect our decision to follow one link over another - possibly to a competitors site. The description should be readable and be no more than 200 characters.

Keywords

See keywords above for information about defining your keywords, they are then added to the keyword meta tag.

Site Map(s)

User Site Maps

It can be very useful to users to have a link to a site map that has descriptions and links to all of your pages, especially if you have a large site, the sitemap can be created in whatever format your site is in, see an example of a site map.

XML Site Maps

XML sitemaps are created in XML language and uploaded to the root directory of your website. They inform search engines how to crawl websites and contain data about each page. See more on XML site maps.

Design and Construction

Your site should be well constructed, keeping code on the page to a minimum, so scripts should be referenced in an external file, and styles should be in a linked CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file.

Ask your developer to ensure that the appropriate tags and meta data are in place for each page - page titles, page descriptions and keywords, also that there are appropriate descriptions for each image - please see our article on adding title tags as they are useful too.

This information is also available as a printable leaflet in PDF format (274KB).