SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION TIPS FROM IMMEDIASITE

Whether you are building your own website or entrusting the job to a web design company, there are a few simple rules to follow when setting it up in order to achieve the best results and help those search engines bring customers to your door. As we’ll find out, there is more to it than just coming up with a colourful design.

When a search engine scans your website, it DOESN’T care about the colourful graphics and Flash animations you might have included in the design. What it DOES look for is written content. It is the words on the page that entice the search engines, so it’s important to include plenty of keywords and phrases (ie, the sort of search criteria someone might type into their search engine when looking for your type of business) in the text.

The first thing a search engine looks for is the header to your page. So it makes sense to use headings which correspond to the search terms your target customers may be looking for. For example, a page title such as ‘Company name - web designers in Windsor’ will work better than ‘Our websites are the best’ because no one is likely to type ‘our websites are the best’ into their search engine…

When setting out the navigation links on your site, keep it simple – for the benefit of your visitors AND the search engines. As far as possible, aim to name your pages in accordance with the ‘search term’ rule mentioned above too.

Now for some general advice:  when designing a page layout, consider the colour scheme.  Does it fit well with the colours of your company logo? Are the words easy to read (ie, not too small) with strong lettering on a white background? And if you are using graphics on your pages it is best to resize them to optimum size first using a graphics editor. If you upload a huge image to your site, THEN resize it, it will slow down the page load time considerably (and probably look odd as well).