Search Engine Optimisation for your web site

[jennyb]

Someone has asked me for some search engine optimisation tips for his web site and I thought that since an awful lot of you have web sites, this information may be useful to others. So, I hope you don't mind me posting it here.

Search engine optimisation is a big topic and can get quite technical so I thought I would just point out some of the more important things:

- Get a domain name and point it to your web space (rather than a weird web address supplied with free web hosting).
- If possible have your important keywords in your domain name eg: wildlife-photography.co.uk.
- Make your page names reflect the content of the page eg: bluebells.htm is my bluebells page.
- On each page have a <title> tag that reflects the content of the page and includes important keywords. eg: <title>English Bluebell - Hyacinthoides non-scripta</title> . Note: This is not the title displayed on the page but on the top bar of your browser. It is VERY important.
- Add a meta description tag in the header. Eg: <meta name="description" content="English Bluebell - Hyacinthoides non-scripta - Wild flowers in an English Country Garden">. Keep it short and succinct.
- Add a meta keywords tag, but this is not so important and is not used by many search engines. Eg: <meta name="keywords" content="English Bluebell Hyacinthoides non-scripta Wild flowers Country Garden">.
- Use header tags on the page to identify important keywords. Eg: <h1>English Bluebell</h1>
- Always use alt tags on images describing the image. Eg: <img src="../a/i/flowers/bluebell.jpg" alt="English Bluebell - Hyacinthoides non-scripta">
- If possible put plenty of text on the page and include relevant keywords. Around 250 words is great.
- When linking from one page to another, add keywords to the link text. Eg: “A catalogue of English birds, animals, flowers, trees and fungus found in an English Country Garden”. birds would link to the birds page, flowers to the flowers page, etc.
- Make a site map which contains links to all the pages in your web site. Link to the site map from your home page if possible.
- Add a sitemap.xml file. This is a special file which contains information about all the pages on your web site and is specifically for Google. See Create your Google Sitemap Online - XML Sitemaps Generator for more details.
- Get as many high quality links TO your site as possible. VERY IMPORTANT.

It may not be possible to implement all of these on your web site, especially those who are using Gallery software which may not allow you freedom to do what you want. But if you can include the more important points, it should certainly help your search engine rankings.

If anyone has any questions I would be happy to try to answer them. There are other things I could add to this list, but I thought I should try to keep it simple.

I have worked in web site design and development for years and have had some success with SEO on my own web site.

Jenny

[zan]

Thanks Jenny! That's really helpful info

One thing I would add as an (non-SEO) aside would be to include the scientific (latin) names for things in the titles \ keywords for images, as well as the common names. If people are searching for wildlife images, they can often be pretty specific in what they are looking for.

Zan

[Pete Collins]

Thanks Jenny, I found that very useful.

[jennyb]

Zan, Pete, glad you found it useful.

In addition to what Zan said, if you include the Latin name in the title tag, then be sure to include it in the text on the page as well as in the image alt tags.

The search engine "spiders" or "robots" are just little software programs that crawl from page to page trying to find out what each page is about. They only really "read" text (although recently Google has started to read Flash movies to some extent), so the only way they can find out the content of an image is by the filename and the alt tag you have given the image.

If you have given an image on your page the filename 1234.jpg and also given it no alt tag, the search engines have no idea about what that image contains and cannot index it.

Jenny

[matt_xyz]

thanks Jenny, that's helpful.

Matt

[Jason Green]

Hi Jenny,

Thanks for that. As a web designer myself I found the Headers part interesting; the site I'm designing at the moment uses Heading 1 to announce the title of each page. It's good to know that'll help with SEO, too

[JennyS]

A good tip I was given a couple years back was to make sure the coding is valid - lots of sites look great but throw up a lot of errors which can penalise them on a search.

I spent about a fortnight solid checking and correcting all the pages using the validator.w3.org and my site went from page 10 to page 1 on a 'Google' for 'wild flowers', 'Irish wildflowers' etc and has stayed there ......