I would like to introduce you to the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), what it means, why it is important to know and how you can use it to help your business grow. Some of you might already know or have heard of the term SEO. It’s a hot topic at the moment, as it helps your business get to the top of search engines which ultimately leads more traffic to your website!
So let’s start with the basics and take you through what you should know to get you started.
1. Meta Tags
The meta tags for each page of your site are very important. If you look at the HTML code of a web page, you will find it in the head section and it will look something like the following:
<head>
<title>Your Page Title Here</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Your Description">
<meta name="Keywords" content="Your Keywords">
</head>
Of these Meta Tags, the Title tag is the most important as is describes the contents of your web page to search engines and users. Your title should include your keywords or keyphrases and help describe your site, or the specific page, in a concise manner. When people are viewing a list of search results, they typically will scan down the list. Make sure your title tells them what your site, or the page, is about. For the title, your key phrases are more important than your company name, unless your company name is a well known brand.
Repeating keywords and key phrases over and over is likely to be penalised and looks terrible in the search results. Entering your page title is possible when editing pages in WebContent or WebCommerce.
Meta description tags are helpful in describing the contents of the site to search engines and users. Search engines will often pull the description tag into the search engine results to display to the user, so make sure this is informative and concise.
Keyword tags are also useful. Use this tag to list the main keywords or key phrases that best describe the page. These will be referenced by the search engines when they index your website.
2. Copywriting
This is the text on the page that your visitors see. This is an extremely important factor in SEO because both the search engines and your visitors rely on the text on the page to understand what the page is about.
3. ALT Tags (Image Alternative Text)
Images are an important part of making your site visually attractive to your visitors but search engines do not understand the content of images on a page. This is true even if the images have text in them. For example, your logo may have words in it. The search engines can not read these words because they are not plain text, but are encoded are parts of the picture. This is why ALT text can be useful. ALT tags are text descriptions that are used to describe an image on a page. These are not seen by the visitors to your site unless they look at the source code, but they are seen by search engines, and will display if the image cannot load for some reason. Sight-impaired people using screen reading web browsers will appreciate them because these browsers can read the ALT text and tell the visitor what the image is about.
If you look at the code of a web page, the ALT Tags will look something like the following:
<img src="imagename.gif" alt="image description">
ALT Tags can also be useful to your optimisation efforts when used with images that serve as navigation links to a page on your site. For example:
<a href="pagename.html" >
<img src="image.gif" alt="image description"></a>
Include valuable information in these descriptions, as well as keywords;
e.g: alt=”balloons.gif” is better than nothing, but alt=”Hot Air Balloons at dawn over Melbourne” is better.
These are just some of the techniques that are applied when performing search engine optimisation on a website. I hope you have found it useful!
