Here are some basic things that I do for most of the websites that I design to make it search engine friendly:
Selecting the words to use in your website title is important to make sure that users will be able to find your site. The page title will show up whenever your website is listed in a search engine (e.g. Google or Yahoo). The title should immediately tell users what your website is about. For instance, my website title is ‘Jamie Soon – Freelance Web Design Services, Malaysia’. So anyone searching in Google using the keywords ‘Jamie Soon’ or ‘Freelance Web Design’ and ‘Malaysia’ would most likely see my website listed at the top of the list. Similarly, if your target audience is people who are looking for homemade cakes or wedding cakes, then it would be best to have ‘homemade wedding cakes’ in your title. And if your target audience is in Malaysia, might as well narrow it down some more and add the word Malaysia in your title. Of course, you could have different titles for different pages in your website. Think of it as a title for a classified advertisement. Something short and sweet that will immediately tell users what your website is about. What you can do is use your company name, accompanied by a short phrase or tagline and also add in your location/country (unless you have a worldwide target market).
It also helps to have a somewhat unique phrase or keyword combination for your website title. There are millions of websites on the internet and if you are just using a common title e.g. ‘Web Design’ then there may be hundreds of thousands of other sites using the same name. But if you add another keyword in your title e.g. ‘Damansara Web Designer’ then it won’t be so common and your website might be listed somewhere at the top of the search engine listing. You can also use unique words with unusual spellings e.g. aquact, dreamz, cellsafe … or you can use other languages like malay words e.g. mutiara, yasmeen, azdaman. The unique keyword is usually your company name.
Therefore, using a good web page title will help users find your website on the search engine.
Inserting ‘meta tags’ into your html code is also important. If you don’t have meta tags in your website, chances are, your website might not even appear in the search engines. Someone emailed me about this and they wondered why their website has not been listed. So I checked the html code and it turns out one of the reasons was the website didn’t have any meta tags. What are meta tags ? You can go to Google and search for tutorials and examples. Its something like this <META>
The description would be a short description of your website, usually less
than 30 words. This will be the short paragraph that appears under the website
title in a search engine listing. Usually, what I do is copy the first few
lines from the clients corporate profile or about us section to put it as
a description.
The keywords are a list of keywords related to your website. The more keywords,
the better. I usually put about 10-20 keywords for my clients. If you are
a freelance web designer you could ask your client to provide some ideas
for the keywords.
Nowadays, I prefer to use plain text for page titles and subtitles because
it’s better for search engines. Once in a while, the search engine crawlers
will search for websites and store it in the search engine database. Using
header tags for your content titles and subtitles will help the search engine
scan your page and determine whether your website content is relevant to
the topic that people are searching for. For example, with the <H1>
tag wrapped around the title, search engines will know, this is the title
and this page is all about wedding cakes.
<H1> Wedding Cakes </H1>
For pages where you don’t have a title, for instance, a homepage or splash
page with just an image with no text, you could still insert the H1 tag
and make it hidden by using CSS.
<H1 style=”display:none;”>Wedding Cakes </H1>
In conclusion, start using just plain text as a page title instead of using
images. Its easier to utilize the Header tags thus making your website more
search engine friendly.
As I mentioned earlier, having more text in your website will help to improve search engine listings. Text content makes it easier for a search engine to pick out keywords from your content and perhaps make it part of a search result if the topic is relevant to what a user is searching for. If your website consists of product photos with not much text involved, you could just add a short paragraph as an introduction to the page. You could also label all your product photos e.g. add a short description under each product. Other ways you could add more text to your website is create a page for your ‘Company profile’ or ‘About Us’ section.
Writing useful articles is also a great way to attract more users to your website. If it is a unique article that people enjoy reading and if you are sharing ideas that people can learn from, your article might become popular as more people are referred to your website, thus generating more traffic. Then these people who just happened to read your articles might explore other pages in your website. You might consider writing on topics of your expertise, e.g. if you are good at baking cakes you can write articles on various types of cakes. This is sort of like a way to add more value to your website. The more value your website offers, the more visitors will be attracted to your website. In conclusion, adding more text content will make your website more search engine friendly and attract more traffic.
For example you could put Copyright 2008 Jamie Soon Designs. It’s a great way to have your company name on every page. Since usually when people look for a particular website, they will key in the company name. Most of the time, you usually have your company logo on every page, but only mention the name of your company in the Homepage and Corporate Profile page. Your company name is a unique keyword. Therefore, having your company name on every page is sort of like an extra precaution to make sure users get to your website if they are searching for your company.
Adding a counter like Statcounter will help you find out your website statistics. Features include finding out common keywords that people use to get to your website. So based on this information you can add in more keywords and tweak your website further for search engine optimization.
Of course there are more things you can do like getting more people to link to your website or hire a professional to do your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). One of my clients hired someone in the US to do SEO for her website and now her website is number one on the search engine listing. Apparently, they do much more than adding keywords and other stuff that I’ve listed here.
In conclusion, these are a few basic things that I do to make a website more search engine friendly. You have to select a good website title, use meta tags to embed keywords and a short website description, use html header tags for your page titles, use more text instead of graphics and add a counter to your page. By doing this, hopefully you will be able to attract more traffic to your website.