Quick Tips

This page contains some quick tips to help get your site noticed by the search engines. Many of these appear on our other pages and are gathered here for your convenience

  • When creating PDF’s don't forget to add in the title, keywords and descriptions as these are one of the methods that the search engines use for finding out what information is held within the PDF.
  • Never forget to fill in the head meta tags for Title, description and keywords as these are used by the search engines. The description tag often providing the "snippet" for Google.
  • Try not to let sites go stale, regular updates (however small) will help keep the search engines coming back. The bigger the gap between updates, the less frequently your site will be visited by the search engine "bots". Blogs can be a useful tool if you post regularly.
  • When creating a webpage remember that the search engines like to have some content to "read" so they know what the page is about. As a minimum aim for about 100 words but try and write between 500 - 800 words of relevant text where possible and sprinkle your 3 or 4 most relevant keywords in the text about every 100 words or so.
  • When asking for links to be placed on other sites, try to link to a lower level page where relevant. If you can get a good spread of links to all levels of your site rather then just linking in to your home page, it will help re-enforce to the search engine "bots" that you have lots of meaningful worthwhile information.
  • Page Titles should ideally contain 6-8 words and 60-65 characters to ensure that the whole Title can be read in the Google Search Results. Try to put important key words at the start of the Title and your Brand or Company Name at the end. This method improves your chance of being found for generic searches. Each page should have a unique Title that accurately describes/summarises its contents.
  • When creating quality content for your site, ensure you keep in mind who your target audience is. Also remember what keyphrases/words you are targeting for the piece to help keep you on track and keep the piece relevant for your target audience.
  • When embedding images into your website, remember to fill in the "alt" tag with something relevant to the page (for example - if you have an image of a couple looking at a house on a page about new homes, you could make your "alt" tag "Looking for new homes" - this helps the search engines with your page rank but also makes sense of the content of the image for users who are using text only browsers.
  • When listing links on a page, try and limit them to "Search engine friendly" chunks of less then 100 links. For instance, if you are listing all the towns in a country, try and break it up by county or region first as per the guidelines given by Google.
  • Never forget the importance of a site map, particularly for large sites. Site maps help search engines to find all the pages on your site more easily and therefore increases the chances of your content being listed. They are also useful for human visitors to navigate through large sites quickly.
  • Make good use of your "h" tags, use h1’s for the title page, h2’s for subtitles, etc - search engines uses these tags to help determine the page content. Always try to keep your h1 tag near the top of your page and have at least one keyword in it.
  • Although it may seem appealing to have Flash, Video and Javascript on your site, try and use them sparingly and don't put your most relevant content into these areas as all of these can make it difficult for search engines to access the information.
  • Site navigation plays an important part in SEO - after all, if human visitors can't find their way around your site, neither will the search engines. Make sure that any pages that have important information on are linked back and forth throughout the site as well as from the sitemap.