Every site completed by us undergoes a basic level of search engine optimisation. Near the end of every project you will be asked to supply us with:
- Keywords Tag - Around 200 characters of keywords and phrases. These should be words and phrases that you would expect people to type into search engines when searching for your website. You should not repeat any word more than about 5 times.
- Title Tags - these should contain around 3 of the keywords from your list and describe your business. This description will be used by most search engines as the brief introductory text for your site when they list you.
- Description Tag - This should be a short paragraph that describes your website / business. This is sometimes used by search engines and directories for your website description.
- Around 50% of your keywords should appear within the actual readable content of the page.
We will insert this information into the code of the website and then submit the site to all the major search engines. The addition of keywords is a foundation for any SEO campaign but is only the start of an effective search engine listing for your website.
The links to and from your website play a large part in how highly you rank with most search engines especially Google. Having a large amount of links pointing to your site will increase the importance of your site in the search engines.
In the case of Google, a basic run down of how its results are listed is as follows. When a user enters a search term or word, it will scour its database to find appropriate websites based on their content. It will then look at how many instances it comes across of each website address it returns as suitable. Then it will look at the quality (in Google terms, "page rank") of the sites that are linking to each site. From this information and using a specific algorithm, Google will list its results based on relevancy.
So as you can see, the 'interlinking' of websites plays an important role in your site positioning. As a site owner, you should approach other non-competitor sites to see if they will place a link to your site on their website or look for directories which carry listings of sites similar to your own - to find these type 'your search term' and 'directories' into a search engine.