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How to Prepare Your Website for Search Engine Optimisation

Guest post by: Keredy Stott

Article Overview: Preparing your website so that search engines, such as Google, can efficiently crawl its web pages is essential - here is some guidance for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes, therefore helping it appear towards the top of the Google rankings.

How to Prepare Your Website for Search Engine Optimisation

Visibility on the internet is a must for businesses in an age where people reach for their mouse or smartphone instead of the Yellow Pages. However, it’s not just about having a website – users need to find businesses online and with 25 million queries being carried out every minute on search engines across the world, businesses need to ensure their websites are optimised. The agency I work for, Punch Communications, assists businesses of all sizes to prepare their websites so that search engines, such as Google, can efficiently crawl its web pages. As such, here is some guidance on preparing your website for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes, therefore helping it appear towards the top of the Google rankings.

SEO starts with choosing the most appropriate keywords for your business, and there are a number of tools out there to assist you with this part of the process, such as Google’s AdWords service. Once you have decided on a few, I suggest between four and eight, these need to be paired to relevant pages on your site. If different keywords have the same landing pages, beware; this means they will be competing with each other in the search engine ranking pages (SERPs). Depending on the final keywords chosen, some changes may need to be made to the wording on your pages as well as to the meta information so that all content contains similar keywords, or you may wish to create new web pages specifically for your keywords

• The website’s folder structure should be straightforward and the URL of each landing page should include the keyword/s – use hyphens in between words, not spaces or underscores
• The page title needs to include the selected keyword/s and can be the same as the URL
• Each page’s meta description should incorporate the particular keyword/s
• Alt tags for images can also include the keyword/s but I suggest to only do this for the most relevant image on each page
• Ensure the page heading includes the keyword and is tagged as a H1, with any subheadings as H2
• On-page copy should incorporate the correct keyword/s, showing search engines that the content is relevant to the keyword/s search term – I suggest one use of the keyword for every 80 to 100 words
• Try to incorporate other keywords into the on-page copy and hyperlink them to their linked landing page
• Users must be able to reach each landing page from the home page, ideally through hyperlinked keyword/s
• If your website operates in Flash, I suggest you look at switching to HTML5 or Javascript for animation effects as this is much more easily optimised and preferred by search engines

Helping Google and other search engines to make a relevant connection between the term and the page essentially can affect a business’ bottom line. By following these most basic SEO steps, your business has started the journey to appearing on SERPs when a user searches for the keyword/s you have chosen to optimise for.

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Article Tags: search engines, SEM, SEO, website
Referred by: http://www.punchcomms.com



Related Forum Posts
Re: How can I promote my site? - There are various useful techniques for promoting a website. In SEO the techniques could be "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. White hat techniques includes following techniques to promote website as per the search engine rules. - Search Engine Friendly Tags - Website submission to Search Engines - Website Submission to Social Sites (Like twitter, Facebook) - Articles Promotion & Press Release Promotion - Quality Directories promotion - Contribution to Blogs, Forums Black hat techniques can reduce website strength in the search engine and can treat site as spam that could be following. - Keywords Stuffing. - Hidden Links - Maximum Links of unknown sites.
What Do You Want To Be Taught? - Hi, My name is Jeff Foster, I will be moderating this new section. I want to get your opinion on topics you would like to discuss & be taught on. I see a great need for small business owners to learn how to perform basic Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which would include the basics about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What do you want to be taught on? Jeff
Website SEO Marketing Consultant from India - Hi all, I am search engine marketing consultant, and has worked on seo marketing of several online websites. In case you need any help or facing any issue related to SEO/SEM, you can post your query. I have 4 yeards of experience in following :- a ) Search Engine Optimization/Marketing b) PPC Promotion c) Website Development too;)
Re: How should i promote a new website? - You could promote your website by increasing traffic. But how do you increase traffic? Some pros uses pay per clicks to get traffic and added revenue. Others would update regularly and post useful tips that are related to what your site is promoting. Others would join blogging networks such as MySpace and even Twitter. On the other hand people use SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. You can also try interacting with sites relevant to yours through commenting appropriately at their posts and even joining discussions. Some would send their sites to directories. If you want you can also Meta tag your keywords. Try offline promotion too. You can use brochures, flyers or even advertise it on newspapers.
Re: Search Engine Optimization - If you are interested to get more information about Search Engine Optimization you can visit Search Engine Watch site gives you a great way to keep up with what’s going on in the search engine world. This site provides a ton of information about a very wide range of subjects related not only to search engine optimization, but also the flip side of the coin; subjects related to searching online.


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