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Search Engine Optimisation Tips ~
How You Can Achieve Better Search Engine Rankings
With over 80% of people using search engines to find what they need on the
internet, it is now an essential business requirement that your web site
can be easily found in the popular search engines.
However, when business owners hear the words “search engines”
many resign to the thought “that’s not a business issue, why
do I need to know about search engines”. Yet the most frequent question
that I get asked is “how can I get more people to my web site”
and with Australian internet revenues set to total $43 billion this year
why wouldn’t this be a business issue?
Knowing how you can cost effectively attract more potential customers
to your business is one of the most important business issues that you
will ever face.
This article outlines the top five essentials that you,
as a business owner, need to know about your web site and search engines.
This information will give you the information you need to improve your
search engine rankings yourself or will give you a better understanding
so that you can instruct your web designer.
Some of you may already be thinking, this doesn’t apply to me because
“my web designer takes care of all that search engine stuff”
or “I’ve already submitted my web site to the top 10,000 search
engines”.
You cannot safely assume that all web designers know “search engine
stuff” and have performed that “search engine stuff”
for you. Knowing this together with understanding that it’s not
enough to simply submit to search engines goes a long way to getting you
on the right path.
How do people find a web site?
People are currently using a range of different search words when trying
to find your products and services through search engines.
There could be fifty or more search terms that people could use to describe
your product or service in a search. For example, if you had a car hire
business, people may use these words “car hire”, “car
rental”, “car rentals”, “cheap car rental”,
“car hire UK” or many other search terms to search for your
service.
Although two search terms may have the same meaning, for example car
hire and car rental, that does not mean that a search engine will produce
the same web page results for both search terms.
Next time you are using the internet, try searching on the words “car
hire” and then “car rental” in the Google search engine
(www.google.com). You will find that each phrase produces a different
list of web pages in the search results. You will also see that some of
the web pages listed for one search term do not appear at all for the
other, even though both phrases have the same meaning.
Of greater importance is the number of people searching with the different
search terms. For our car hire and car rental example, this varies significantly
with car rental being searched on 20 times more often than the phrase
car hire.
Why does this matter to you? It means that if you do
not know which words people use to find your product or service you are
missing out on thousands of potential customers. If your car hire business
only focused your web site towards the “car hire” you would
only be attracting one out of every 21 people looking for your service.
What to do? You need to look at your web site to determine
what products or services you are trying to sell. You then need to research
what are the most popular search terms people use to find your products
or services. There are various internet tools that will help you to perform
this research.
How to use the keywords
Once you know what words people use to find your products and services
you need to include those words in your web site. This is sometimes referred
to as “optimising your web site” or “search engine optimisation”.
You need to look at the existing pages on your web site and make them
“search engine friendly”. This means, you need to structure
your web site pages so that the search engines can find the information
that they need to rank your web page highly.
The search terms can be used on your home page and in other relevant pages
on your web site. For example, you may have a specific car hire page for
car hire in England. You may target that page for “car hire UK”
and have another page targeting “car rental”.
There are a series of places that you need to include your search terms
in your web page. These places include the title tag, page headings, in
the url if possible, in the alternative image text (alt tags) of your
web site images and most importantly in the web site content.
If your research generated twenty good search terms you need to include
those words in your web site. This does not mean that you only need to
use the most popular search terms in your web site, or include all of
the terms in your home page.
It is best to focus each web page for one search term. Depending on the
structure of your web site, you may need to add new pages to target some
of the new search terms.
Links to your web site
Each search engine has different criteria for ranking web sites. Most
of the popular search engines now place great importance on the number
of other web sites that provide a link to your web site. This is called
“link popularity”.
What to do? : You should try to get as many links to
your web site from other web sites as possible. To do this send a friendly
e-mail to complimentary businesses in your industry asking them to provide
a link to your web site and in exchange you will offer a link to their
web site.
Inclusion in directories
It is very important that your web site is listed in the world’s
major search directories, Yahoo!, Looksmart and Open Directory. Many of
the popular search engines place a great deal of significance when determining
search engine rankings based on your web site being included in those
directories.
Submit to search engines
Finally, you need to ensure that the search engines know about your web
site. You need to submit your web site to the major search engines. You
do not need to submit to 10,000 engines. The most important search engines
to submit to are Google (www.google.com) and MSN (www.msn.com).
The majority of Australian search engines are now powered by American
search engine results. Australian search engines mainly determine an Australian
web site simply based on the domain name, so if you do not have a .com.au
domain name, it is highly probable that you will not appear in Australian
search results.
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 Sharon
Wild
Strategy & Marketing Director of e-JAZ, Sharon has been involved in the
e-commerce community for several years. She successfully manages Australia's
largest online jewellery store, Gillett's
Jewellers.
Sharon can be contacted via email on sharon@e-jaz.com.au
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