SEO: Search engine optimisation 23 May 2006
Sponsored by Bannerman Technology
I've built it, now they will come. This may be true in Kevin Costner baseball films, but not on the web unfortunately. When you have built your website, you are going to have to work hard to make it successful.
If you want search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo to drive traffic to your website, you are going to have to get to grips with search engine optimisation.
How Search engines index and rank websites may differ for each engine, but the content and structure of your website will radically affect its position on search engine returns.
So how do you optimise your website?
Content, content, and more content.
A few pages with basic product listings and contact information simply isn't enough to get you to the top of a search anymore. You must make your Website work for you by regularly posting and updating content.
- Have lots of quality information geared toward your target audience and make sure it's easily readable by the search engines, for example if you have text embedded in graphics, the search engines won't be able to read it.
- Create content useful to your visitors. Post things like newsletters, FAQ pages, top news stories, press release archives, etc.
- Make sure each page within your site it named and titled correctly.
- Offer information in a way that's useful to you customers, explain your products and services fully and link to any case studies or positive news stories.
- Offer information about your industry and in the products or services you are promoting.
More than 50 percent of search engine users never go past the first page. Those who do almost never go past the second, and past the third is rare indeed. So it's a battle to get ranked as highly as possible, but by regularly updating your Website content you will be far friendlier to the search engines.
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