Search Engine Optimisation

This month we take a look at Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) which is becoming an important issue for businesses of all sizes that are trying to establish an on-line presence.

What is it?

The phrase Search Engine Optimisation is a relatively self-explanatory term used in relation to web marketing. It refers to developing or amending a website so that it will be highly ranked by the major search engines for particular keywords or phrases.

The search engines have particular rules or variables that they use to rank websites. Search Engine Optimisation seeks to change a website so that it will best fit these rules and thereby achieve higher rankings.

Why Do It?

Anyone that establishes a commercial website is hoping that people will visit the site to potentially buy their goods or services. There are several ways to attract people to a website including on-line and off-line advertising.

The majority of consumers using the internet rely on search engines, such as Google, to search sites that are relevant to whatever they're looking for.

Search engines will provide a list of sites considered relevant for any particular search term. The higher a site ranks on the list, the more chance that someone will visit.

Accordingly, a high search engine ranking for words or phrases relevant to a website can be a very valuable asset to any enterprise.

Things You Can Do:

Businesses are increasingly looking towards professional SEO consultants to assist with optimising their web presence. Internal resources are not normally available to keep up with all the constant changes within the search engine industry and to create the content necessary to maintain good rankings. There are a few basic things though that site owners can do themselves that should help to optimise their site for the search engines, such as:

- Determining and applying relevant keywords
Selecting keywords that are relevant and effective can be critical to the success of any on-line business. Accordingly, it is worth spending time to carefully research and select keywords that are appropriate for your site.

- Obtaining links from other sites
Links associated with a site are one of the major criteria used by search engines in determining their rankings. While the number of links is a factor, their quality is also very important. Google, for example, measures quality by a system called PageRank that effectively looks at the relevancy of the links and the sites that contain them.

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- Optimising your HTML code
The search engines continue to strive for achieving the most relevant results possible in order to maintain their popularity with users. Ensuring that your website's HTML complies with some relatively common standards will go a long way towards achieving substantially improved rankings.

- Adding suitable and relevant content
Having good quality and relevant content is becoming one of the most important factors used by search engines in ranking sites. The content needs to relate to your identified keywords however it is also important to ensure that the content is readable and informative.

Please visit our website : www.ausnetech.com.au for a full series of articles on Search Engine Optimisation, and particularly on SEO matters relevant to Australia.

For SEO services meeting the demands of Australian companies, we recommend ozSEO (www.ozSEO.com.au).

Optimising the HTML Code of your website:

• Ensure that search engine spiders can access all pages of your site
• Make sure that all pages link to another page
• Link Text should include main search terms
• Title Tag should preferably include page’s search term at front of title
• Meta Description Tag should include at least one reference to intended keyword
• Meta Keywords Tag should list all relevant keywords present in the general text
• Heading Tag should include important keywords
• Text should include several references to keywords and phrases
• Bold Text should include main search terms whenever possible
• Alt Text (images) should include relevant search terms