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15/07/2008  |  Advice on Search Engine Optimisation

If you're looking to make the most of your websites potential by using search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques then we have some valid basic advice for you about how to optimise for search engines. We have laid out some basic search engine optimisation tips plus we have also provided a word of advice in implementing these tips.

Firstly we advise that a company carries out keyword research for the keywords your company wants to be found for, then you need to spotlight that key phase on the actual page you want to rank high with in search engines. This involves making sure the keyword features on your webpage as often as possible within the webpage content but making sure you don't over use it. Flooding your website with your keywords can be dangerous as search engines could deem it as spam, so be warned against misusing SEO techniques such as overusing keywords. You need to find a happy medium between the use of your keywords and the overall number of words you use on a web page. The rule here is a logical use of a keyword so that the text is still easily readable and understandable. A great tool to help you research your keywords is Wordtracker.

Next you need to make sure your main keywords make it into the title and description tags of your website code. At this stage you have to remember that the keyword meta tag - which used to hold high significance to being indexed for a keyword - is now longer important and receives little weight in the search engines these days.

Search engines, especially Google consider backlinks to be one of the most important factors when consider where to rank a website. With this in mind, it is essential that you encourage others to link their websites to yours. Backlinks are such a major part of search engine optimsitaion that we have provided further advice regarding this in another article entitled: Tips on Off-page Optimisation.

The next search engine optimisation technique you can use, and is favoured by the likes of Google, is blogging. Any followers of Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team and a specialist in search engine optimisation issues, will know he's a major fan of the WordPress platform for blogging which we also use here at White Hat Media. Blogging is a great way to build keyword rich, interesting and engaging content for your website which can be used as link bait to attract other people to backlink to your website. With that in mind have a look at our regular blog postings relating to the search engine optimisation industry and feel free to link to the White Hat Media SEO blog or to our homepage at - www.whitehatmedia.com

Our final piece of advice is to register with free tools available to you. There are many out there which can help with your own search engine optimisation campaign. Firstly, and in our eyes most importantly, there is Google Analytics. This is a free Google service that can generate detailed statistics about the visitors to your website. By using this tool you can identify your most productive keywords, see what pages are most viewed on your site and generally get a better idea of the level of traffic you are receiving.

Another free offering from Google is their webmaster tool which can provide businesses with detailed reports regarding your pages' visibility within Google's search engine. By using this tool you can view information about your internal links and backlinks to your website and find out which search queries drive traffic to your site. The Google webmaster tool can additionally provide you with the ability to inform Google about your web pages by allowing you to submit a Sitemap file to improve your search engine crawlability. Another tool that is available for free and would be very useful is the new recently launched version of Google Trends tool which we have dedicated another article to, so to find out about this tool please click here - Google Trends for Websites.

So there you have it, our basic advice regarding optimisation. By following these few simple search engine optimisation rules you can substantially boost your search engine rankings and increase your website traffic. In saying that there is a major caveat to all our search engine optimisation advice and that is it takes time and as we all know time is money. So our final advice is this; to get the best results in search engine optimisation then employ a professional SEO specialist to carry the optimisation work out for you. This way you can guarantee your search engine optimisation campaign will be carried out efficiently and will achieve optimum results.