Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search Engine Optimisations (SEO) is basically how you can modify or improve your website to make it easier for search engines, like Google and Yahoo, to include your website in more relevant searches. Some basic techniques are listed below:

Tags and Meta Tags

If you are designing your own web pages you should already know a little HTML langauge and a little about tags and meta tags. Tags are used to format the appearance of your page, such as <h2> and </h2> (used to denote one of the many headings). Meta tags are like the follow:

Above is an example of the 'description' meta tag. Another important meta tag is the 'keywords' meta tag. However, both the keywords and description tags are no longer consider as important as previously, mainly due to abuse, but still using them can aid some what for little effort. Add each a description and key word meta tag to each of your pages and be as relevant as possible. When using the keywords meta tags seperate your keywords with commas, for example:

Make use of heading tags (eg. <h2>) as some search engines can place more relevance on page headings - make sure your headings are meaningful too! Another important tag to use is the <title> tag. Using a good description in the title tags can make a difference.

Good Content

Nothing can replace good content in a web page. This has always been the golden rule over fancy tricks and other optimisations. Add good content to your site and over time people will find your site, as well as search engines having more information to play with.

Good, UNIQUE content will make people come back time and time again.

Keywords

If you want people to find your website when using certain keywords in search engines make sure you actual use these keywords in your pages! For example, if you want people to type "Melbourne Website Designer" in Google and find your website but you don't use "Melbourne" in your webpages except for a tiny address on your contacts page that may or may not specify a different suburb how is this going to work? See the problem?

Write a list of keywords you want people to use to find your website (don't get carried away too much) and include them where you can in titles, headings, paragraphs, product names, etc.

Other ways to improve search engine ranking

As well as modifying and improving your web pages there are thing that you can do outside of your website to improve search engine ranking.

External Website Optimisations