How to get your website noticed

The first step is to compile a brief list of likely looking keywords.

Some will be obvious (a publisher selling books on SEO would consider ‘SEO books’), while others will be found via research.

While it isn’t a good idea to blindly copy keywords, it is advisable to use the View/Source (or equivalent) option in your browser to inspect the code of leading online competitors.

You can then decide whether to use the keywords by testing them in a keyword tool. ­ A good one is the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool in the Virtual Real Estate Toolbar.

Enter the keyword you want to test, select an area and click ‘Suggest’.

After a pause, you’ll see estimates of how many times that keyword was used in the past month or so.

It’s sometimes a good idea to select keywords with the least traffic, so you’ll be competing with fewer sites to top the search engine tables.

Once you’ve decided which keywords should give the best results, use your web design software to label them as meta tags for your site. Alternatively, add meta tags to your pages by editing the HTML using a text editor ­ there are plenty of online tutorials available, such as the Astahost HTML Basic Tutorial.

Site issues and relevance
Originally, search engines ranked sites in terms of keywords; sites with more instances of a keyword ranked higher than those with fewer. To remove the abuses this led to, less subjective site factors were registered to determine a site’s overall relevance ­ the more your site has, the higher it ranks.

The principal changes are as follows. Domain names should be relevant so that search engines can determine how appropriate your site is to your subject. Page and file names should be relevant, too; whatever keywords are appropriate for a given page should be used in its page and file names.

Images should be described by Alt tags in the HTML code. Aside from facilitating accessibility, Alt text is read by search engines to evaluate what the image is about, which contributes to website relevance.

Judicious use of header tags on your pages ­ to add structure and outline the main section headings ­ can also help, as Google uses these to assess relevance. Internal links within your site should not have the same anchor text; vary this as much as possible to increase relevance.

Make the hyperlinked text relevant to what it’s linking to. For example, instead of hyperlinking the text ‘click here’, use the appropriate keywords, such as ‘contact us’.

The most crucial change that search engines underwent was a strong reliance on how other people view your site. In other words, most search engines assess which sites link to yours, then make a judgement about how relevant and significant they are.