Tips for SEO

[gerryonline]

Hey guys, I am thinking of starting a website but I want to make sure it is designed with SEO in mind, but I dont know much about it.

Can anyone suggest any basic tips to get my site a good ranking in search engines?

[twenty-eleven]

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

should give you an idea

[escentre]

hi gerryonline
you can be a forum member of the www.submitexpress.com (http://www.submitexpress.com) I'm sure there many members there that can help you

[intergise]

There's really two important areas of search engine optimisation (SEO): onpage and offpage.

Onpage is where you are at now - ensuring that the code behind the site is correct and supports any ongoing optimisation

The first step is to do some keyword research and determine a list of keywords that your customers will use to search for your product/service. It's a bit of balancing act, selecting keywords that are relevant but not too competitive. Not relevant and you wont attract the right customers, too competitive and you'll get lost in the crowd.

The next step is good content. Content is king when it comes to websites. You need to have a good amount of text on each page which should include the keywords where appropriate.

Then it is ensuring the title, description and keywords head tags are complete and optimised for each page. They should be different for each page and reflect that page's content. Don't forget the alt and title attributes in the body tags.

After the site has been launched there's the ongoing offpage optimisation.

Register the site with search engines and directories. Then start link building and content management programs. The more relevant inbound links you have to your site the more useful the site will appear, the higher it will rank. Also keep updating and expanding the content. As I mentioned before content is king.

There's no quick fix for SEO, it's a lot of individual steps that together help promote your site.

There's a SEO whitepaper (http://www.intergise.com/services/search-engine-optimisation.php) on my website which provides more detail on what's involved that you may find useful.

[Slade]

There's really two important areas of search engine optimisation (SEO): onpage and offpage.

Onpage is where you are at now - ensuring that the code behind the site is correct and supports any ongoing optimisation

The first step is to do some keyword research and determine a list of keywords that your customers will use to search for your product/service. It's a bit of balancing act, selecting keywords that are relevant but not too competitive. Not relevant and you wont attract the right customers, too competitive and you'll get lost in the crowd.

The next step is good content. Content is king when it comes to websites. You need to have a good amount of text on each page which should include the keywords where appropriate.

Then it is ensuring the title, description and keywords head tags are complete and optimised for each page. They should be different for each page and reflect that page's content. Don't forget the alt and title attributes in the body tags.

After the site has been launched there's the ongoing offpage optimisation.

Register the site with search engines and directories. Then start link building and content management programs. The more relevant inbound links you have to your site the more useful the site will appear, the higher it will rank. Also keep updating and expanding the content. As I mentioned before content is king.

There's no quick fix for SEO, it's a lot of individual steps that together help promote your site.

There's a SEO whitepaper (http://www.intergise.com/services/search-engine-optimisation.php) on my website which provides more detail on what's involved that you may find useful.

Great post intergise!

[intergise]

Glad to be of help.

[HWT]

You run into the 'content is king' issue a lot when you have a site that is very low on text and high on graphics. A picture may tell a thousand words, but it doesn't get indexed all that well by Google. Also makes for incredibly badly targeted google adsense and a low clickthru rate - my traffic and the rule of thumb of 2% clickthru rate says my site should be making a few $100 a month in adsense revenue .... it doesn't, and sadly there isn't much I can do about that.

[intergise]

Not sure what type of site you've got HWT but could you add text descriptions to the images?

[HWT]

Been there, done that, but about half of the site traffic is to a dictionary and alphabet, and when you have a picture of a crocodile there's not much to say except ... C is for crocodile. Most of the site is images with a sub < 10 word description per image. Adsense has a very hard time with it. I started a more text-heavy blog to counter it a little.

[Heath Sanchez]

It's great that you are thinking about SEO before you even start the site - good on you!

Have you considered including a blog? A blog can add fresh, regular content to your site each day that will be full of relevant keywords. Each new blog post you right will be an extra few chances that your site to show up in the Search Engines.

Also, if the blog is good enough - people will naturally link to your content so you will be enjoying the on-page and off-page factors of SEO at the same time! You'll be able to attract some very targeted users who are interested in your topic by doing this.

If you do include a blog, I recommend Wordpress with all of the SEO friendly plugins installed - then just keep putting out good content!

Hope this helps! If you would like to hear my SEO tutorial in audio format, check out the link in my sig.

[gerryonline]

Thanks for all the feedback.

If I was to sum up what you have said, I need to;
- Have incoming and outgoing links to and from popular sites
- unique content that is regularily updated (maybe a blog)
- descriptions on my images
- make sure I use my keywords wiseley on all pages indexed..

Anything I have missed?

[Heath Sanchez]

Also:

- Keywords in your Title

- For your H1 header tag within the page HTML, make sure that you contain
the same keywords that are in your title.

- Also use descriptive sub-headers (H2 or H3) with your keywords in them
before every few paragraphs. This improves usability and helps the search
engines to know what the page is about.

- Use bullets, italics <em> and bolding <strong> for your keywords to break up your site content and make it easier to read.

- Write your website copy for humans. Make sure you don’t overuse your
keywords just to get high search rankings. Search engines don’t like pages
that look ‘spammy’, so make sure you write naturally.

[gerryonline]

Do submitting sitemaps to google help much at all?

[intergise]

Protocol sitemaps help search engines to properly index your site and anything that does that has to be a good thing.

How much it helps is difficult to answer but I think it's like much of SEO, another small step that together sould combine to promote your site.

[HMcIntyre]

When you're creating the site title (by that I mean the part between the <title> tags in your header, put your main keyword first.

For example, if you're "Bob's Building Business" based in Brisbane, your site title should read: Brisbane Bulders - Bob's Building Business. That way the company name is still included, but the first part of the title has to be the main keyword for SEO.