How do I make my website rank well in search engines?

Here’s a few tips to help ensure your site’s geared up for scoring well with search engine ranking algorithms.

Good SEO, search engine optimisation, is all about user and search engine friendly techniques involving not just keyword rich content, but good quality content. Both need to be wrapped up in an engaging and user friendly site structure.

Your site needs to work across a range of internet browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc) and if it does, then you know your site structure is probably OK.  It’s well worth looking at how your site displays in different browsers and also on mobile devices and on the iPad.  If you don’t have an iPad, you probably know someone who does as there are so many around now.

So, what do you need to look at in your own website to make sure you’ve ticked all the boxes re. basics required for maximising your site’s ranking potential?

Title Tag

The words in the title tag appear in the link that is displayed in the search results.  The title tag is where you tell the search engines and would be visitors what the page is about. The title tag needs to contain important keywords, but also needs to sound natural. Think about relevant words, or a phrase someone might type into search. Now ask yourself, does that match with what I want people to find me for?

Backllinks

Good quality back-links from sites with authority will help your site authority.  However, getting those links takes time. If you have an integrated blog you could consider offering to write guest blogs for sites that enjoy a higher authority than yours. Make sure they include that all important link back to your site though. Paying for links is not a good idea and search engine algorithms are fairly sophisticated these days, so it’s not really a route worth travelling.

Content

New, quality content is what really helps. Having an integrated blog is an excellent way to achieve this quite simply; every time you publish a new post it’s treated as new website content by search engine robots. Although it may just be a short post, it will be treated, effectively, as a new page on your website. That’s good news!

Now, configuring content for search engine robots is one thing, obviously important, but if the content is fairly boring then your readership is not going to be very impressed. If your readers don’t feel your posts are interesting and useful then they’re not likely to return to read more. So, it’s a bit of a juggling game.

Don’t copy and paste content you’ve found elsewhere on the web. Apart from the obvious copyright issue, search engine algorithms will recognise duplicated content and penalise you accordingly. I’ve had plenty of conversations with people asking how much of duplicated content they’d have to change to “get away with it”. I’ve heard a range of answers to that one, but my advice is just don’t do it. It’s not clever, it’s not honest and it’s not the best way to manage engagement and build a loyal following.

In considering technology based content, avoid, or replace  elements configured with ‘Flash’. Why? Flash is a technology that can deliver  stunning effects and a user experience designed to impress, but  it will be wasted on anyone viewing your website on any Apple device. Apple doesn’t support Flash technology, so the user will be unable to see your Flash configured content.

What’s the latest market share for Apple web devices?

There are other technologies which are better avoided if you can, particularly for reasons of page loading times. However, I don’t want to get too technical in this article and if you want further information you can always get in touch with Website Wings via the contact page.

Hope this has been helpful and given you some things to consider looking at, with reference to your own website.