Optimisation Tutorial

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a complex and skilled process and the information presented on this page is therefore designed to provide a purely fundamental guide. However, if you utilise these tips when building your website, you could discover the ideal opportunity to enhance your chances for improved search engine rankings. It is essential for the success of any online business to appear in the top 10 returned results of the most widely used search engines - this basically means that your web address needs to appear on the first page of the major engines as a result of any important keywords or phrases entered by potential customers searching for any particular product, service or information at the very least.

Effective search engine optimisation is not something that you can expect to learn all about in a day and ideally needs to be implemented by an experienced, professional optimiser if your business is to achieve success on the web. Constantly monitoring a website, making a few alterations and adding new material is an important aspect of the optimisation process, so time is a critical factor in maintaining search engine rankings, but with any new online business there can certainly be no harm done by following some of the basic elements of SEO, and that begins with the correct use of the most important META tags...

<TITLE>Your title here</TITLE>

The "title" tag is the most important tag to include as it will be displayed in the search engines' returned results. The keyword/s you deem most important for your product should be used only once within a short, legible and plausible sentence constructed of approximately five or six words in total.

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="your description here">

The "description" tag is of secondary importance to the "title" tag in the search engine optimisation process, and where some engines will display your description in full, others will only show it in part. One or two short, legible and plausible sentences should be used accurately and concisely describing the product, service or information you are offering and incorporating your important keyword/s or phrases no more than twice.

<META NAME= "keywords" CONTENT="Your keywords here">

The "keyword" tag is no longer recognised by many of the major search engines due to past abuse and misuse, but there is no harm in including it as part of the SEO process, particularly to highlight the possibility of mis-spellings. Your important keyword/s or phrases should be used within the tag no more than once.

Taking into consideration the fact that any page of your website with sufficient copywritten content that directly relates to the product, service or information you are offering is a possible entry page for many search engines, any optimisation you wish to carry out should be incorporated into ALL relevant pages using meta tags with information within each individual tag that is specific to the content of a particular page.

The use of SEO copywriting to produce the text content of your entire website is of paramount importance for achieving optimum results in search engine rankings, so wherever possible, include at least 200 words of copywritten content per page. Search engine spiders only read - or 'index' - text and links so your navigation system should ideally consist of text links as opposed to Javascripted ones, although a dynamic navigation system can be used as long as text links are also included somewhere on the main page, or within a sitemap that can be accessed directly from a link on the main page.

A "links" page was once considered a vital inclusion in any website's construction and an invaluble asset to the optimisation process, and can still be of benefit to your online success since many search engines view links from other sites as being a positive vote for yours. Whereas reciprocated links used to be looked upon as an excellent way to optimise your business's potential on the web by increasing its profile, one-way linking strategies have become a more reliable method for encouraging a boost for your company in the search engine rankings, especially when the links come from sites directly related to the product, service or information provided by your own.

It is no longer necessary to submit your website to the major search engines as the spiders will index your pages in time as a matter of course, but paid inclusion in any directory is to be viewed as a step in the right direction for the promotion of your business on the Internet, particularly as this can be considered a good quality one-way link.

The search engine optimisation process will never produce desired results overnight, but if you follow these basic instructions when tackling the SEO of your website yourself, your rankings should improve with time. The best solution, however, is to hire a proven, experienced, professional search engine optimisation company to do all the hard work for you, and if they can continue to optimise your website on an ongoing basis, the best possible rankings can be achieved faster and consequently sustained over a much longer period of time.