Content

The most important aspect of your website to get right from a Search Engine Optimization point of view is your content.

You should always consider the actual human visitor to your site first although there are a few considerations that can be made to the search engines' scanning program. Text in images will not be seen by the search engine and Flash animations may not be indexed either. It is important to back up anything in such images, such as diagrams, with standard text.

It is worth considering the words and phrases that your target online visitors would search for. These are called 'keywords'. You should make sure that you do use these keywords in the relevant content on your site but trying to add keywords artifically is called 'keyword stuffing' and can be detected by the search engines and the page or site penalized in the rankings. The best solution is to write good quality copy text but keep the keywords in mind.

Structure the Content

Organize your website so that a human reader finds it easy to navigate to the information they want quickly. In most cases, by doing this properly you will make it easy for the search engine spider program to organize the information on your site also.

Think of the articles, images, snippets, products or pages that make up your site as items that must be filed in a filing cabinet. How would you group them together into classes of items to go in a file and then groups of files to go in a drawer ? Organize your website in a similar manner with aptly named links between pages.

Titles and Meta Tags

Every page on your website should contain a title that describes what the page is about. If you're not sure how to do this your web developer can help you.

Meta tags are pieces of information in the HTML code that make up the web page 'behind the scenes'. They are not usually seen by visitors to your site but the search engine programs can use them. Two important ones to discuss here are the Description meta tag and the Keyword meta tag. The Description meta tag should very concisely describe what the web page is about. Many search engines use this but it must be supported by the actual content. There is no point in having a page description meta tag and then not having good text on the web page to support it.

Keyword meta tags on the other hand are ignored by some important search engines such as Google because they were at one stage artifically 'stuffed' with keywords with a view to improving rankings. Yahoo did however read these but announced in Oct 2009 that they we're no longer doing so. Bing apparently ignores them. My recommendation is to enter some if it's convenient - it can't do any harm.