eTailor

SEO Tips

Included below are some basic essential steps one should take with their website in order to help optimise it for search engines...

1. Include meta data tags
Metadata tags are hidden pieces of information that are read by search engine spiders and bots as they visit your site. By including a short one-line description of your business, and a comma-seperated list of keywords that define the services you offer, you help the visiting search engine determine the content and relevence of your website. A list of 5 or 6 keywords is sufficient.

2. Include ALT tags on all your images
For every contextual image on your site, you should include a text "ALT" description. For example, if you had a picture of one of your products, you should include a brief one line description of your product along with the image. This ALT tag is generally hidden from view, and only appears when a user hovers their mouse pointer over the image. Including ALT tags is also helpful for visitors to your site who use screenreaders.

3. External links into your site
Having other websites who have content similar to yours (for example, in a similar industry) link to your website can help boost your positioning on search engine rankings. You must be careful to ensure the links inbound are from a reputable source, as links in from "link farms" could harm your ranking.

4. Keyword-rich, quality content
This is perhaps where you should focus most in order to have a well optimised site. Firstly, the content on your site should be keyword rich. For example, if you are in the textile industry, you should include key words like "textiles", "clothing", "material" etc. within the text content on your site. This helps visiting search engines to see that your site has useful, quality information regarding a topic.
Quality content is also important - this means your content should not simply be paragraphs of keyword-rich text that makes little sense to a human reader. Search engine spiders are adept at identifying this, and could penalise a site for it.

Conclusion
The above tips should help your "organic" listings on search engines like Google, Live, Yahoo etc. If you wish to ensure your placement on rankings, you must enter into programmes such as Google AdWords as there are no guarantees of placement in organic search engine results pages. AdWords allows you to pay to list your website, and the amount you pay dictates your position i.e. you placement and rank position can be selected and guaranteed. If you would like to learn more about this, please contact us regarding "AdWord Campaigns".