SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION

A voodoo art, search engine optimisation is one of the most debated subjects among internet techies and businesspeople alike. Here’s a few things you can do to try to boost your position on those all-powerful search engines. Some you can do yourself, but others require coding and/or marketing expertise.  Impress combine the two to offer our clients structured, ongoing SEO programmes.

DO YOUR RESEARCH
To start an SEO programme proper, the first thing to do is establish a list of the most relevant search terms, or keywords, people may use to find your site. Do your research and make sure you choose words and phrases used by your customers rather than internal jargon. A pay per click campaign is a great way of trialling different keywords – ask Impress about our Google Adwords programmes.

BASIC META DATA
Once you have your keyword list, your site contains the right “meta data” - code that search engines use to help index your site. Check your meta data by selecting Page | View Source in Internet Explorer – it should be towards the top of the page. Each page needs a title, a description packed with relevant terms and a keyword list. For advanced SEO, create separate meta data for each key page on your site.

REPEAT YOURSELF
Like the meta data, the text within your site should be packed with relevant keywords. You should look to use each of your top keywords at least twice on each page so the search engines know you are serious! However, if including each word twice makes your text convoluted, avoid it. Put human readers first!

TEXT IS KING
Where possible, try to make sure that your home page has at least some keyword-rich text. Remember that search engines can’t “read” pictures, movies, flash elements and pdfs so turn them into text in the eyes of the search engines by using keyword-rich “tags”.

SUBMIT!
Once your site is launched, all the leading search engines have pages where you can “submit” your site and be added you to a list of sites for their “crawlers” (indexing software) to visit. These will find you eventually anyway – submissions are just an attempt to speed things up. However a visit from a crawler is no guarantee of a good position.

CHECK YOUR RANKING
Your Google page ranking reflects how the search engines view your site. Quality of code, number of relevant incoming links and traffic levels are among the factors which determine your ranking. Download the Google toolbar to check your ranking – measured out of 10, 2 means you’re out of the blocks, 4 to 5 is excellent for niche businesses, 6 or above means you’re hitting the big time and 10 means you’re Google.

GET LINKED
Incoming links are one of the most crucial elements in achieving a good page rank and positioning. Put in place an active campaign to get other sites to link to you. Exploit your contacts and search for sites that appeal to the same audience as you. Don’t underestimate free internet directories – some can be a great help. Check their page rank to assess their usefulness – the higher the rank of the site linking to you, the more beneficial it is.

AVOID SPAM
Outdated practices like stuffing your site with hidden text, using competitors’ names or irrelevant terms in your keywords and constantly changing your meta data are frowned upon, and could result in a dreaded blacklisting – exclusion from a search engine without trial.

A CONSTANT PROCESS
Put in place a good statistics package and keep your progress under review. Keep reviewing your keywords and tweak them if necessary, but if your rankings or your positioning start to slip, it may be time to freshen up your site. Search engines like sites that are kept current.

ALLOW TIME
You can do all of the above and your site may still languish low on the search engine rankings – sometimes for several months. Be patient and allow your efforts to bear fruit. It may be some time until the search engine Gods cast a glance your way, no matter how frantic your hallelujahs.

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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
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