There are hundreds of thousands of websites, which means that it’s very easy for new ones to simply disappear unnoticed into the mass. If you want to make sure that your site doesn’t simply become part of the crowd, you need to work at it.
Search engine optimisation (SEO for short) is something you’ve probably heard of but don’t really understand. It’s the way you can tweak your site so that it can be found by search engines – and therefore users. From the outside this might seem a dark art, but in fact by following a few simple tips you can make a big difference to the way your site performs.
Content Is King
One of the best ways of making your site attractive is to have good content. This means material that’s useful and relevant and also that’s renewed on a regular basis. Fresh content is attractive to search engines, but it also gives your customers an incentive to keep revisiting your site. A blog is a good way of doing this, especially if the rest of the site is relatively static, but do make sure that it links to and is relevant to other parts of your site. It’s important to have quality content, though, as spiders can distinguish poor text.
Search engines use programs called ‘spiders’ to ‘crawl’ websites and index the content. Text is important here, as images or flash animations are meaningless to spiders but they love text. If therefore your site has impressive JavaScript menus or image maps for navigation, it’s important that somewhere on there page there are text links too so that the spiders have something to follow. Make sure that images have ALT text links too. Web design companies such as polarwebpeople.co.uk can advise on this when building your site.
Think Links
The way the Web works means that links are important. A good link to an authoritative site is more effective than several low-quality links. It’s also worth encouraging other sites to link to yours, as this can boost your site’s popularity.
If you want to encourage local customers, then make sure you put your location in the text. You could offer web design in Huntingdon rather than just web design, for example. This will help you stand out in search results when people are looking for something in a particular area. This is becoming more and more important as people search with mobile devices that have geo-location capabilities.
It sometimes seems that everyone is trying to unlock the secret of SEO and that the world is full of search gurus who will solve all your problems – for a fee, of course. There are of course lots of other things involved in SEO beyond the ones we’ve covered here. But the key elements to a successful site are still quality text that’s updated regularly and links to other sites with a good reputation. If you start out with these basic principles, you’ll already be part of the way to success.
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