How to get your website noticed

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the process of improving websites so that search engines rank them more highly.

Sites that appear higher in search engine rankings are far more likely to be seen, and therefore viewed.

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to SEO: white hat (ethical) and black hat (unethical).

Although black hat techniques can work in the short term, in the long term they’re self-defeating.

They will probably be detected by search engines, resulting in the site being permanently blacklisted, so they won’t be discussed here.

Avoiding black hat techniques is no loss, however, since white hat techniques are plentiful and free.

They can appear complex, which tends to drive small companies with no dedicated IT department into employing SEO consultants to do it for them.

The problem with this is cost, as many small businesses don’t have the budget. But with some time and effort, it’s possible to do the job yourself with the help of free software.

Here we provide a broad overview of what you need to do.

Keyword optimisation
Google is by far the most popular search engine, so it’s a good idea, in the early stages at least, to confine your SEO activities to it. Any optimisations you carry out to make your site Google-friendly are also likely to work with other search engines, as they follow broadly similar principles.

Keyword optimisation is the most important aspect of SEO ­ if this isn’t right, none of the other techniques will work. The main point is that you want to attract relevant traffic, so you need keywords that are specific to the website’s theme.

Each page should have keywords that are targeted at its content. They should also be multiple, rather than single. For example, ‘SEO book’ and ‘SEO books’ would be far more useful than just ‘book’ and ‘books’.

You should also use variants and abbreviations. For instance, in a site devoted to SEO, it would be better to use ‘search engine optimisation’, ‘search engine optimization’ and ‘SEO’.

The reason is that search engines such as Google examine words on your site and determine whether they are semantically related; if they are, the site ranks higher. There’s no point in using what search engines call ‘stop’ words ­ a, the, and, in, on, of, be, I and me ­ because they will simply be ignored.