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The basic laws of search engine optimisation

Posted By : mattyb 28th Oct 2006

There is one question I get asked so many times its unreal. “What basic things do I have to do to help my site in the search engines?”

Well now I can answer that question in the following article

Firstly there are a number of “steps” that you must do to help your pages with search engines, now some people will disagree with some of them but I assure you do all of them and you will help your pages drastically.

Step 1 - Keywords

Now some people say that keywords are a thing of the past, that most search engines don’t even use them anymore, this may be true but they forget that the search engines STILL index these words so regardless of whether they are used in the way they used to be they can still help your site. Now remember with your keywords you have to be relevant to the page, if your page is about pie’s then you don’t want your keywords based on musical instruments now do you, it just makes no sense! So how do you choose the best keywords? Well this is where a great piece of software can help you

http://www.goodkeywords.com/

Download the software called Good Keywords, this little beauty will tell you how many people are searching for the keyword you enter per month, but that’s not all!! It also shows you alternative keywords and how many searches those keywords get as well. In short this software will tell you what keywords to use.

Step 2 – Title Title Title

The title tag for your pages once again must be relevant; also using the good keywords programme you should try and get one of the higher ranked keywords in your title. This will help you once again.

Step 3 – Heading Tags

That’s right the good old header tags (< h1 >< h2 >< h3 > etc) the search engines pay particular attention to these tags and rate the content within them higher than normal text. “Why don’t I put my entire site as a header tag then?” Well for two reasons.

1. It will look terrible.
2. The search engines are clever they will know what you are doing and will then give you a BAD RATING for doing this.

Even bold text is considered more important than standard text, always keep this in mind!

Step 4 – ALT and TITLE attributes

This is one of the more overlooked search engine steps. Why would you optimise your ALT and TITLE attributes? Well remember we said the spider index’s everything on your site? Well it also index’s the ALT and TITLE attributes as well! So you can double your word count for every image and link you have! But remember that they have to be relevant to the link or image they are with.

So those are the 4 basic steps to help improve your “onpage” Search Engine Optimisation. In the next few articles I will be showing you how to improve your “offpage” Search Engine Optimisation and a few tips and tricks that will have you reaping in the rewards.