21 November 2009
This article explains some basic search engine optimisation practices as a good starting point.

Good web designers consider gaining top search engine placements for your website a crucial part of the web design process. After the time, effort and cost of creating a website, it is most important to drive people to the site in order to generate leads.

There are many factors that web designers need to consider when performing search engine optimisation on a website. Firstly, time should be taken to research key phrases, their competitiveness and estimates can be made on the amount of traffic that can be expected fro these phrases.

Once these key phrases have been identified, the site itself must be optimised. Unique “title” and “meta” tags should be added to each page of the site to begin with, describing the page content and where possible, using key phrases. The code should be cleaned up ensuring that any JavaScript is added to the page using an “include” file. The next task will be to look at the text content of the page and ensure that there is enough text on the page for engines to spider and gain an idea of what the site is about and make sure there are enough key phrases placed within the text. This is known as “keyword density”. Very importantly, where possible, minimally the homepage should be W3C compatible. Lastly, all links should be checked to make sure there are no dead links and the site is in good working order.

Once this has been completed, web designers can then setup webmaster accounts at Google, Yahoo! And Bing and an XML sitemap can be submitted to let these engines know exactly what pages exist on your site and how the site should be followed. Any private areas of the site can also be addressed here so that the engines do not spider these pages. Any errors the engines pick up in the site will be displayed here so it can be easily fixed.

RSS feeds can be created that extract the text content of the site and these feeds can be submitted to various RSS directories, along with the website itself being submitted to other engines and directories. These all help in gaining links back to the site which is key as Google favours sites with many links to them as it believes these sites must be more popular with users.

As an ongoing process, articles and blogs can be written and posted regularly to show the website is active and content is being updated and the site is always fresh. web designers can write these articles and blogs for you and post them on the Internet while also linking any key phrases to boost your chance of success.

While this is just a starting point and a summary of some basic SEO practice, it’s important to note that there is much more to optimising a site completely but by entertaining these points, it a good start.