Steps to successfully optimise your website for search engines.

There are two sides to search engine optimisation, on-site optimisation, activities that need to be performed on your website’s content and structure; and off-site optimisation, which refers to search engine techniques that are not performed on your own website.

This section will focus on on-site optimisation.

accessible CONTENT

There's no use in having a great looking website if if search engines can’t see it.
It is important that your website is programmed in a search engine friendly manner, respecting the “grammar” of the web.

• Sites that use a lot of Flash technology will not be as successful as well-coded HTML sites. Even though Google is making significant progress in reading Flash content, it is still far from being optimal.
• Sites that use HTML “Frames” technology are not search engine friendly.

You can get an idea as to how friendly your site appears to Search Engines by typing some of your URLs into  http://www.seo-browser.com , which helps you to assess if all your text content is visible to search engines.

LINK STRUCTURE

The Internet is made of millions of pages that are linked to one another. These links are the essence of the web. They are referred to as hyperlinks.
Search engines navigate the internet, and if the hyperlinks linking your webpages together, they won’t be able to move to the next page, and the next one, and so on. They won’t be able to index each page and therefore make it available to users searching for what you are offering.

HTML
If you edit your website with a content management system, you shouldn’t need to learn HTML.

Correct structure of hyperlinks on my website

• The navigation bar of a website is its main suite of hyperlinks. Users and search engines should be able to access every single page of your website using your navigation and sub navigation menus.
• It is also important to have a reasonable number of hyperlinks within the content of your site, especially on your home page. This will inform your readers and search engines that such and such pages are more relevant than others.
• The text of the hyperlink should indicate what the page you are linking to is about, ideally it should summarise the subject matter of the page. Having the page’s keywords within the hyperlink text is crucial. Avoid the “click here” as they would only inform search engines that the topic of the page is “click here”!

TITLES, HEADINGS, DESCRIPTION, KEYWORDS, HYPERLINKS, ALT tags

Title tag
The page title is a one-line description of each page of your website. It is displayed at the very top of the Internet browser window:

• For Windows users, it is displayed on the top left of the browser window.
• For Mac users, it is displayed at the very top of the browser window but justified in the middle.

In web jargon, this title is known as title tag. Search engines give immense importance to the title tag of each page as it identifies the content of a web document.
Title tags are not only important to search engines but also to humans as they attract their attention in search engine results.

How to edit title tags
 - Title tags are located in the header section (top section) of each webpage. As a website owner, you should be able to edit the title tags using your content management system or in your HTML page itself if you do not have a content management system installed.

 - If your website was built by a web professional who has poor knowledge of search engine optimisation, there is a large chance that they did not pay any attention to your title tags.

Guidelines to search engine friendly title tags:

An excellent source of information on title tags is the SEOMoz blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/best-practices-for-title-tags.

Headings
Just like chapters in a book, headings are used to structure content in a reader-friendly and hierarchical manner. They describe the section of information that they introduce. It comes as no surprise that search engines rely on headings to understand the weight and relevancy of each section of your page.
In HTML, headings are organised from 1 (H1 - the most important) to 6 (H6). Unless you are writing a webpage that is extremely rich in content - such as a book - there is no need to use H4 to H6.
It is recommended to use headings H1 to H3 in this order, and not to skip levels. Experts also advise to limit the number of H1 to two maximum.

Just like title tags, headings can be changed using your content management system. In the HTML document itself, they are represented by <H1></H1> to <H6></H6>.
Research has shown in the past year that search engines do not seem to place as much value as they used to on the keywords held within the headings. However, it is still important to use them appropriately as they provide paragraph summary to the users.

Meta Description
The description is the snippet of text displayed below a listing in the search engine results page. Search engines do not use it to rank your page but it is a chance for you to stand out from your competitors on the search engine results page.
Use it as a teaser for your webpage content. It will encourage the visitor to click on your listing. Ensure it also holds your page’s keywords as the keywords used by the user in the search field will be bolded in the description, thus drawing the user’s eye.
The description tag, just like the title tag, is also part of the page header. It is referred to as the Meta description tag. It is generally located in the same area as the title tag within your website’s content management system. In the HTML files, look for <meta name="description" content="This is where you have to add your description" />

Guidelines to search engine friendly description tags:

Meta Keywords
The Meta keyword tag was a location where your web developer used to place your webpage’s keywords to tell search engines what a page was about. This tag was crucial when search engines could not read the content (or body) of a webpage. Now that their robots can feed on almost every piece of content, the Meta keyword tag has become obsolete and useless. It is no longer used by Google to rank pages.
However, there are still many uninformed developers who use the old Meta keyword method. Pay attention to this when you hire a web developer.

Image Alt tag
Alt tags are for images. Since search engines cannot see images as such they rely on the Alt tag to understand what the image is about.

Structure of the page address (the URL)
Each web document or page has a unique address that can be typed in a browser to access it directly. This address is called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator).
Example of a URL: www.web-duka.comcom/online_marketing
URLs appear in many locations:

• In the web browser’s address bar
• Below the description in the search engine results
• In the content of other webpages as a hyperlink

Since search engines do not reveal their secret method to rank websites, one will never know the extent of the relationship between the URL structure and the search engine rankings. However, following the below guidelines will help you improve your visibility:

Guidelines to friendly description tags: