Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Quick Guide.

This is a big subject with many resources on the web. A few terms below will give you a good understanding of how it works and enable you to craft website content that Search Engines can see with ease.

Take Note: Content is King. Fortunately you don’t buy a carton of Milk and find Paint in it, and you don’t do a web search for Milk and end up with search results about Paint either. Search Engines improve day by day their ability to relate search terms to relevant websites, in descending order of relevancy to the search term. Therefore your Page Title, Page Description and Page Content should contain the same key words and terms to ensure they are relevant to each other.

Page Keywords

Keywords are the primary words within your page content that relate to the overall content of the page. For example if you are writing a page about general writing implements, the words you would probably use in your content would be; writing, writing implements, writing pens, ink pens, pens, pencil, pencils, paper. The keywords are also the search terms that you would want the page to be found when searching. If your content is very specific, say a particular make of pen, “parker pens” and your content is specifically about Parker pens, typing into a search engine “pens” will probably not see the parkerpen.com site on the first search results page, typing as search for “parker pens” should do. Your objective would be to get your page to the top of the search results page for all the above search terms relating to writing implements. Ideally being higher in the search rankings than parkerpen.com in a search for “parker pens”.

Page Content

As a general rule of thumb the page content should contain your keywords towards the start and end of your content. This concept is known as keyword density and has more recently become an even less exact science, but the logic of it just makes so much sense. Without these keywords in your text how can the text be relevant? To what degree you place keywords and keyterms in your content has to be based on what you are trying to say in your content.

The craft of good web copy is to introduce the keywords in this quite rigid fashion for search engines and also make it readable to your human visitors. The common sense approach is to write your copy with your keywords in mind and then fine tune your copy ensuring good use of the keywords. Search engine technology improves all the time and in real terms the automated checks that search engines perform on your content will determine the relevance of the search terms to the page content.

Looking at the above search engine result example, the top line of the result shows the page title, slightly cut short as the page title is over 64 characters. Below the title is the description of the page, if the search term was “parker pens” the person searching for information about “parker pens” will make their decision about the relevance of your site based on this information. They may also be influenced by the bottom line of the search result, the site address and page file name as these would also indicate a relevance to the search.

Page Title

This is a very important factor in your page for SEO, it is shown in the browser title bar (top bar) when viewing the page content, but is not part of the actual viewable text in the document. The title tag is also displayed in the search results page of a search engine, directly above the page description. The title tag is one of the underlying pieces of code in the page structure.

Rules for the construction of the title tag, using Google as the de facto standard:

• The title should be no longer than 64 characters in length including spaces
• Primary keywords should be at the start of the title
• It should contain the keywords and phrases that accurately describe the page content

Page Description

Again a very important factor for SEO. The page description tag like the page title is part of the underlying code of the page. The page description can be seen in the search results page of a search engine, directly below the page title. It is the area where you provide a short textual description of your page content, the aim of this description is to indicate to the person searching that your site has the appropriate information about the subject they are searching for.

Rules for the construction of the description tag, using Google as the de facto standard:

• The description should be no longer than 250 characters in length including spaces
• It should read like an introduction or preface to the page content
• It should contain the keywords and phrases that accurately describe the page content