When looking to hire a web designer it is good to know a few basic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques so you don’t end up hiring a lemon! An SEO website is a website that is coded well for search engines like Google to be able to find your site when someone searches for content that your site relates to. It is very important your site has a good mix between SEO and visual graphics to obtain the best results. Tip 1. Page Titles
When using Google search results the page title is the blue link
that appears first in the listings; it lets people know who you are and what
you do or more specifically what each page is about. When viewing a website
these sit in the browser tab. Keep these short and keyword rich (words you
think people might search that has to do with your company). Make sure every
page you have has a different page title!! Google doesn’t like repeated
content, and you want to maximise your keyword reach.
This is what the piece of code looks like that sits in
your <head> tags:
<title>Your Company | A brief description of what
you do</title>
Tip 2. Description
This is a slightly longer summary about each page and its
content. The summary sits below the URL when a search result comes up. The
words that people search often get highlighted in this summary, so make sure it
contains plenty of searchable words you think people might use when looking for
someone who provides your service or product.
This is what the piece of code looks like that sits in
your <head> tags:
<meta name="Description" content="Put
your summary in here, think of all the words associated with you company and
put them in a sentence. Avoid commas."/>
Tip 3. Keywords
Each page should be targeted towards a different keyword.
Your web designer has the opportunity to list keywords with commas on each page
which should help optimise it. Don’t repeat these keywords on each page, each
page should be targeted to a new topic to optimise your results.
This is what the piece of code looks like that sits in
your <head> tags:
<meta name="Keywords" content="List
your keywords, keyword rich, keyword optimisation, SEO, online SEO, search
engine optimisation, key word" />
Tip 4. Page URL
This is the name given to each page; it should be short,
no more than 4 words and use a dash (-) to separate words if you have more than
one. This should be specific to what this page in your website is based on, use
keywords!
E.g www.yourcompany.co.nz/unique-page-url.html
Tip 5. Submit a sitemap
This is something that happens at the end of your site
build. A sitemap indexes each page and creates a web plan of what pages link to
each other.
You can get it done for free here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and then ask your web designer to submit it to your webmaster tools.
You can get it done for free here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and then ask your web designer to submit it to your webmaster tools.
Side
Tip. Google analytics and webmaster tools help you see how your site is performing;
you can view who is going on your site, how long they are spending, what they
are searching and from there better optimise your site. It doesn’t directly
give you a better SEO website, but it is a good idea to have it.
You can set up a free account here: http://www.google.co.nz/analytics/
If you are going to do this though please let your web designer know beforehand as they need to install the tracking code into each page you wish to track. It’s a bit of a pain to install it after they have completed it.
I’m sure you have already been spammed by the many
companies claiming to be SEO experts who can get you to the top of search results.
But the truth is Google changes the rules surrounding SEO constantly just so
people can’t cheat their way to being first on the list. The BEST ways to have
your site showing up in results is relevant content, updating it frequently and
inbound links. Have a content rich site,
with great headings and plenty of information on each page, and then refresh it
occasionally. Sites that sit with the same content for a long time go stale and
start to drop in rank. Refreshing content shows search engines the site is
still being used and will be relevant to searchers. Advertise your site
everywhere - put links to it in as many places as possible. Social media is a
great start and call popular bloggers attention to the site if relevant.
Don’t ever repeat content and don’t try and trick Google by hiding content or colouring it the same colour as the background – whatever trick you think of, they have too and your site will be penalised if/when they find out.
These 5 tips are the very basics of SEO for the web. If
your web designer hasn’t got these sorted then remind them it is what you are
wanting and they should be able to input the code for you.
