Top five search engine optimisation tips

You can begin to improve your website's search engine rankings with a few changes to the content of individual web pages.

1: Choose one main keyword per page
Search engines know what a web page is about by looking at the words and phrases that appear on it most often.

By choosing one main keyword or phrase for each page on your website, you can encourage search engines to associate the page with that phrase. What you need to do: List all of the search terms that you want to attract visitors with, then try to match each one to the most appropriate page on your website.

Example: If you want to attract visitors who search for "red leather handbags", choose that as the key phrase for the page that has most information about red leather handbags.


2: Rewrite each page to use your keyword/phrase
Search engines expect to see a word or phrase make up six to ten per cent of a page. How often the keyword/phrase appears is called your page's keyword density.

If your keyword/phrase appears too often, search engines may consider the page to be spam. Too rarely and the word/phrase doesn't feature highly enough to be associated with the page. What you need to do: Look for opportunities where you can easily include the keyword/phrase in the page's text. Each time your keyword/phrase can be seen on the page, it counts towards your keyword density. This includes the title and navigation.  When you rewrite the text, remember that it still needs to make sense to the person reading it.

Step 1: Highlight everything on your web page and copy it to the clipboard.

Step 2: Paste your web page's content into a blank document in your word processor.

Step 3: Remove any images that have been pasted into the document and perform a word count.

Step 4: Count every instance of your keyword/phrase. A phrase counts as one instance, even though it has more than one word.

Step 5: Divide the page's word count by the number of times your keyword/phrase appears. The number you're left with is your page's keyword density.

Example: If your page has 100 words and "red leather handbags" appears six times, you have a keyword density of 6%.

3: Use HTML to emphasise your keywords
Most of us think of HTML as a way to make our web pages look good. However, HTML is really for describing your information.

The purpose of an <h1> tag (In Homebuild this is the pages description) isn't to tell web browsers to use a large, bold font: it's to tell browsers that this is the most important text on your page. Because the text is important, web browsers will display it in a large, bold font; the styling is almost a side-effect.

It''s not only web browsers that use HTML tags. Search engines decide which words and phrases are the most important on your page, based on the tags you use.

Which HTML tags are important? Experts identify a number of tags that search engines take notice of, in order of importance:

    * <title> - this sets the title used in the browser's title bar and ideally, should only include your keyword/phrase but will usually also have your website name after the keyword/phrase.
    * <h1> - should only appear once and ideally feature only your keyword/phrase.
    * <h2> - ideal to emphasise supporting words that are similar to your keyword/phrase.
    * <h3>
    * <h4>
    * <strong> - use to emphasise your keyword/phrase when it appears in your text.

Note: Using these tags will effect the way that web browsers display your website. CSS allows you to change the way that web browsers display them.

What you need to do: Reconsider how you use HTML tags in your page. Remembering that your design is important and that the page should still make sense to the visitor, you should aim to rewrite your web pages to show search engines which words are most important.

4: Meta tags - extra information for search engines
Meta tags contain extra information about your web page. By placing them in your HTML, you give search engines another reason to associate your page with your chosen keyword/phrase, without displaying it on the page itself.

What you need to do: Meta tags are very easy to add your web pages. Most web design software will have an option to put them in your page. If you use a text editor, simply add them into the <header> section of your HTML.

The most important meta tags are "keywords" and "description".

Keywords: Another opportunity to include your keyword/phrase and any associated words/phrases.

Description: Often used to describe your web page in search results lists. Also allows you to present your keyword/phrase to the search engine again.

Example:
<meta name="keywords" content="red leather handbag, handbags, handbag, leather, red, accessory" />
<meta name="description" content="Everything you need to know about red leather handbags" />

5: Make sure search engines know about your website
Most search engines look for a file called "robots.txt" in the parent directory of your website. This tells search engines which parts of your site you want them to include in their database.