What Is SEO: How Do You Optimise Your Site?

January 18, 2010

Carrying on with this seven part series, this post looks at the elements you can utilise to optimise your site. There are many critical components involved in optimising a website – your goal is to ensure your site has the best chance of being crawled, indexed and ranked by search engines spiders. It’s important to build a good quality, well optimised site to help it get ranked for your chosen keywords.

Below are the main areas that are involved in optimising a site:

• Design: Ensuring that the graphical elements and layout combine to create a user friendly and search engine friendly website
• Information Architecture: Creating a search engine friendly organisational hierarchy
• URLs and Meta Details: Creating descriptive URLs and unique, keyword rich meta details
• Navigation: Creating a navigation system that guides users easily through both top level and deep pages. This also includes the use of breadcrumbs, alt tags for images and well written anchor text
• Functionality: Ensure that all tools, scripts, images and links function as intended
• Accessibility: Focusing on removing broken links and ensuring that content is visible and accessible in all browsers and without special actions
• Content/Copy: Ensuring content is optimised with 3-5% keywords, keyphrases and synonyms, uses keyterms in relevant placing within the copy and has correct use of H1 and H2 headers

Creating Quality Content

The phrase ‘Content is King’ could not be truer for SEO. At the end of the day, search engines want to produce a list of high quality, relevant pages to their searchers. What makes a good quality site – one with hardly any content that is never updated, or a huge site with loads of fresh, new, unique content? What would you rather spend time on?

Users will probably enjoy spending time on a site if it is full of good content. Likewise, good quality content also helps to generate links – helping the popularity of your site even further.

For more information on why quality content is important, read these blog posts (they are based around how blogs can help you create content, but also include details of why and how fresh content helps your site in terms of SEO):

• Top Ten SEO Tips For Small Businesses: Part One
• Top Ten SEO Tips For Small Businesses: Part Two

Part five will be published on Wednesday and will discuss how you can build links for your site. Make sure to come back and read it! As always, any comments are apprecitated!

Filed under: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Tags: (SEO), search engine optimisation, Website ranking