Entries Tagged 'SEO - Search Engine Optimisation' ↓

Now this is a subject that can be a little bit contentious among the webmaster community as there are various opinions as to whether there is any SEO benefit to using keyword rich pagenames or ones which at least describe the target page.

For example a url might be:
www.mysite.com/index.php?product_id=25
or it could be
www.mysite.com/8mm-widget.html (for example)

(we aren’t going to get into url rewrites here this is just by way of example)

the pages could equally be:

www.mysite.com/page1.html
and
www.mysite.com/web-design-services.html

I’m not stating for a minute that the search engines take any account of the words in the page name as part of their ranking allgorithms let me make that clear.

The reasons that I suggest the use of keyword rich pagenames is that they are easy for people to read (most search engines show the target url at the bottom of the website listing) and can reinforce the search keywords/phrases as they are shown on page and also highlighted (at the time of writing Google certainly does this).

The SEO reason for using keyword rich page names is that very often when people create links to other pages (i.e people linking to pages on your website) they use the pagename as the anchor text – i.e the link shows as:

www.mysite.com/web-design-services.html

therefore your target keywords end up in an external link to you which can all help build up the relevance of your page for those target keywords.

We get asked a lot about keywords when building websites and there seems to be quite a lot of confusion regarding them so we thought we’d write something here.

The opinions range from that you should stuff hundreds of keywords and phrases into your meta keywords to not using them at all because they make no difference and you could get penalised.

Once upon a time keywords were exploited shamelessly and many websites did (and still can do) become penalised for keyword stuffing thus generally the search engines now take less to no notice of them as ranking factors.

However, their judicious use is asked for by accessibility guidelines so the keywords tag should be used.

Making sure that you do not have a huge string of keywords duplicated on every page of your site can also help the search engines figure that smiliar pages are not duplicate content.

We use them very sparingly, always make sure the keywords meta tag is populated but only with relevant thematic keywords that appear in the body text of the webpage and that seems to work well.

Here’s a tip which is pretty much a bugbear of mine as you see it all over the web.

Links that look like this:

for more info on blue widgets click here

Every time someone does this they are missing an opportunity to get some keyword rich anchor text pointing at their page and into the search engines (every little helps).

Much better would be:

Find out more about blue widgets. (for example)
Not only are you helping make your target page more relevant to the keyphrase ‘blue widgets’  but it also helps on the accessibility side of things where people using screen readers may have the link text played to them audibly in order to tell them what the link is about.

Always use your linking text to reinforce the content of your webpage and help the search engines work out what the page is about and rank it more highly…

Essentially there are 2 types of Search Engine Optimisation:

1. on-page / on site SEO

2. off-site SEO

On page concentrates on the text within the webpage/website, the various tags and elements etc within the webpage that we can use to let the search engines know what the page is about.  On site SEO covers things like site architecture, internal linking structure, internal anchor text (what wordage you use in your links), page titles, headings, descriptions and keywords etc.

Off-site SEO is about getting relevant links to your web pages from respected resources to reinforce your on-page / on-site factors.

In essence off-site SEO is about getting other websites to recommend your website as a trusted resource on a particular subject by linking to it.
It is the word-of-mouth that increases the popularity of your offering.  In other words – you create relevant meaningful content and then other people tell the search engines how good it is.

The on page / on site factors are easily controlled by the website owner and therefore generally not weighted as highly as ranking factors as the external off-site factors (although the weightings do shift all of the time).

So, in order to rank as well as possible a good SEO effort will optimise the on-page and on-site factors and then go about building links into the site to create some link-popularity.

Our first post on SEO and we thought we’d start off right at the beginning.  When we speak to clients and website owners we find quite often that they don’t really understand what SEO is – here’s our own (very simplified) explanation of SEO and what it’s purpose is.

In a nutshell:  SEO is a way of describing to search engines exactly what an individual web page is about, why the content on that web page is so unique and special and deserves to be ranked highly in the results pages.

It is to help the search engines understand the content and context of your page and convince them that it is a valuable resource on the subject.

In practice with SEO what we do is focus the subject matter of the page and use all available elements / tags and SEO techniques to reinforce the context and to give the page an air of authority on the subject – so when someone searches on a particular subject / product / matter the search engine brings up our web page as a highly relevant and regarded resource.