Optimising Your Website Copy And Layout To Help Enhance Your Search Engine Rankings

February 27th, 2010 by admin

There are numerous facets of your website’s design and Online Marketing that will contribute to how successful you are in achieving a high Search Engine Placement. The most beneficial methods for reaching your goal are what we refer to as “off page” methods, these will typically benefit from the assistance of a Website Optimization Company. However, at this time we shall deal with a few of the “on-page” alterations that most website owners can easily implement to make a difference in getting a better search engine placement.

For any website to achieve its aims (at least in the sense of attracting visitors who want to be there), the site needs to be categorised by the search engines on the keyphrases that search engine users are likely to use when seeking a site like yours. There would be little point in your business being listed in the yellow pages under “Delivery Companies” if what you actually do is Floristry. No one is going to find you when they look in the directory. Things are very similar on the web but without the strict categorisation of Yellow Pages to guide you. Let’s consider our Florist again.

If our beautifully designed floristry website talked endlessly about “spring blooms” within its text, it may well be indexed by Google etc. under the section Spring Blooms. All fine and dandy… provided of course that searchers enter the phrase “spring blooms” into the search box. If however, they search for “Florist”, in all likelihood our beautiful floristry website probably won’t be listed in the results. The point is, if you want your website to be found, it really does have to be indexed correctly for you to have any likelihood of achieving a reasonable Search Engine Placement. The search engines will of course do that for you, but you do have to give them some help. At a very basic level, if you think users of your service will look for “florist in Bradford” then make sure you have that phrase prominent in your website.

To take that concept a little further, consider a whole range of search terms (or Keywords) that you think people might use when trying to find a website such as yours and include them in your site pages, taking care to ensure that the site remains readable. Bear in mind here that by just including keywords and phrases on your site certainly won’t guarantee that you’ll be found, but with any luck you should be categorised correctly by the search engines. Whether you’ll be found during a search will depend on a number of points including how much competition you have and how highly ranked your site is with those search engines. To make improvements to your ranking for various keywords, you’ll probably need to enlist the assistance of a Website Optimization Companywho can help you put togethera full Online Marketing plan.

Once you’ve decided on the most beneficial keywords and phrases that searchers will be looking for, try splitting these into associated groups. Our Florist, for example might bringtogether Valentines (Valentine Flowers, Valentine Roses, Valentine Gifts, Valentine Flowers Bradford), Occasions (Birthday Flowers, Anniversary Flowers, Thank You Gifts, Occasions Flowers Bradford) Funeral (Funeral Flowers, Funeral Sprays, Funeral Wreaths, Funeral Flowers Bradford) etc. etc. On the website, our florist would now ideally have three separate pages, one each for Valentines, Occasions and Funerals. Within the Valentines page text would now be mentioned the key phrases Valentine Flowers, Valentine Roses, Valentine Gifts and Valentine Flowers Bradford and so on. I’m sure you can see how this could be applied to most websites.

By adopting this approach, when the search engine reviews (or crawls) your site, as it will do on a regular basis, it should categorise each of your pages according to the content and title, provided that it all appears to match. In so doing, our florist may reasonably expect to have a chance of being listed in a search for “Valentines”. It goes without saying that, it is a long way from here to getting a page one Search Engine Placement, but at least you’ve made a start.

In addition to getting your keywords right, you’ll need to be sure that you (or your web designer) observe a few basic rules to be sure that each of your web pages is given its best possible chance with the search engine. Make sure that each page is named using the chosen keyword (e.g. Valentines.htm), has a unique title which includes a keyword and describes the page succinctly (e.g. Valentines Flowers, Roses and Gifts); then ensure that your chosen keywords are each used as