February 2004
Search engine optimisation (SEO): The basics
What is SEO & why is it important?
SEO is about making your website in such a way that it will appear higher in the search rankings. A website that's optimised for search engines can reap huge benefits on to your website and your business.
- 42% to 86% of websites are found through search engines (source: Shari Thurow - Search Engine Visibility).
- There are 300 million searches carried out per day, every day (source: Shari Thurow - Search Engine Visibility)
Choose effective keyword phrases
Effective keyword phrases are frequently searched for (high demand) but not being targeted by many other websites (low competition). Please read the article, How to find good keywords for more information.
Use these keyword phrases effectively
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Now that you've found some great keyword phrases, you need to put them in the important places within each web page. Search engines give higher relevance to certain words and phrases within HTML documents so it's essential that you put your keyword phrases in the correct places.
The more confident a search engine is about the subject of your website, the higher your web pages will be in the search rankings. If you only place your keyword phrases in the META tags your website will not get a high ranking.
Some of the best places to put keyword phrases are:
- Page title
- In headings
- As links
- In bold text
- In the first 25 words on the page (this refers to the first 25 words of text placed in the HTML document, which is often navigation)
- In the file name (i.e. the URL)
- META tags
HTML pages must be easy for search engines to follow
Search engines scour the Internet looking for web pages to index, following links from one web page to the next. To ensure a search engine ranking, all pages on your website must be accessible to search engines. Some search engines have problems with:
- Links accessible solely through frames, image maps, or JavaScript
- Very long pages
- Very short pages
- Flash pages
- Long JavaScript (JavaScript should be placed in an external document)
- Dynamic URLs
If any of these describe pages on your website then your web pages will probably not achieve a high search engine ranking.
Have a high number of quality links into the website
Inbound links to a website play a significant part in determining its position in the search engines. Be aware though, it's not just the quantity, but also the quality and click-through-rate of links to your website which is of importance. To find out more about building up links to your website please read the article, Build up links to your website.
This article was written by Trenton Moss. Trenton's crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he founded Webcredible, an industry-leading user experience consultancy, helping to make the Internet a better place for everyone. He's very good at running CSS training and spends much of his time working on the world's most accessible CMS.
What next?
- Read more search engine optimisation articles on this website
- Optimise your website with our usability consulting and accessibility consulting services
- Get a new website through our user-centered design and accessible web design expertise
- Get our accessible and usable CMS so your site offers outstanding accessibility
- Attend one of our 6 interactive usability & accessibility training courses
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