What is Search Engine Optimisation?
Search Engine Optimisation (also referred to as SEO - which is short for the full term), is the process of making your website more highly-ranked by using valid and legitimate tactics in order to do so. First, it's important to understand the basis for how a site is considered "more important" by most search engines.
So what methods should you use to improve your search engine rankings?
Some recommendations I would make specifically for blogs are (however, some of which also apply to websites, too):
Some recommendations I would make specifically for websites (however, some of which also apply to blogs, too):
Specifically for META tags, it's recommended:
For images, make sure you:
Hope this helps.
Search Engine Optimisation (also referred to as SEO - which is short for the full term), is the process of making your website more highly-ranked by using valid and legitimate tactics in order to do so. First, it's important to understand the basis for how a site is considered "more important" by most search engines.
- Content - content is very important to a search engine. Always make sure you have unique and original content and to update your website or blog when you can. Never use extracts of other people's content or copy content found on another website. If you are going to use extracts of content found on another website, make sure you link back to that website or blog in which the extract exists. Google will otherwise not index the page in their search engines, and in some more serious circumstances, may penalise your website or blog's general ranking on the search engine itself.
- Links - getting backlinks from other websites is important - especially websites that are more authoriative than your website or blog. Getting link exchanges is also an effective way of improving your search engine rankings; and Google and other search engines take this into account because it is a network of links and increases real exposure of your website or blog to visitors on those other websites.
- Page loading - It is not specifically known whether every search engine takes page loading speed into account, but it is known that Google takes this into account. Make sure you optimise your images (using compression utilities such as Trimage on Linux distributions, ImageOptim on OS X, etc.) and try and use CSS alternatives where you can. Make sure your website is generally fast as well. If your website is slower as a result of the server of your web hosting provider, it may be a good idea to consider moving elsewhere or request them to sort the load speed issue - because it can improve your search engine rankings - whether in a small or big way.
- Country - if you are targeting UK visitors with your website or blog, make sure your website is hosted in the UK, as Google (and likely other search engines such as Bing) take this into account. Search engine results for the same search terms will be different in Google UK vs. Google US, because Google will be wanting to provide more relevant and local results for their users.
- Other search engines - don't just take Google into account. Other search engines like Bing have a sizeable share of the search engine market and many users do indeed use Bing. Also focus on your search engine optimisation performance on Bing as well as Google. There are, of course, other search engines that people may use - Ask.com being a primary example.
So what methods should you use to improve your search engine rankings?
Some recommendations I would make specifically for blogs are (however, some of which also apply to websites, too):
- Do not use too many keywords and categories per blog post. Google takes this into consideration.
- Do not have too internal backlinks per blog post. That is, do not have too many hyperlinks to other pages on your blog on each blog post. Google takes this into consideration.
- Make use of the "alternative text" ('alt' attribute) for images. Google takes this into consideration, so make use of alt text as an alternative description for your image.
- Make useful content that is not too short. Short content won't get as much attention by Google as blog posts that have more content - and that is, meaningful content.
- Do not use a <meta> title and description tag in the header files of WordPress blogs, as that will be the same on EVERY page, including your blog posts which will adversely affect your SEO. If you want to use meta tags (and Google does make use of them in search results, by the way), make sure you have <meta> tags for each page or simply just for the blog index.
- Remember, make sure your blog loads fast. Slow blogs won't be as prioritised as a fast blog.
Some recommendations I would make specifically for websites (however, some of which also apply to blogs, too):
- Name your files appropriately. A file name of "mice.php" is not as descriptive (and also from an SEO perspective) than "computer-mice-history.php". You'll defintiely have better SEO benefits by using a more descriptive file name.
- Make sure page titles (i.e., the <title> tag) is optimised for each page. Do not use the same title for every page. If you have a page on computer mice history, make sure you add this to the title and then perhaps afterwards a dash (i.e. -) and your website name. Do not use <meta> title tags that are the same on each page either.
- Remember, make sure your website loads fast. Slow websites won't be as prioritised as a fast website.
Specifically for META tags, it's recommended:
- Not to have excessive keywords in the "tags" and "description" meta tag.
- Avoid using the description to add "keywords" unless the keywords are long enough to appear as part of a description in general.
- Be descriptive on what your website or blog is about.
For images, make sure you:
- Optimise them (compress the size of them) if you can.
- Make use of the "alt" attribute (which is also required for all images in XHTML Strict documents).
- Have file names for the images that represent what the image is - in essence being a kind of "description". This is good for SEO - especially for Google Image results.
Hope this helps.
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