Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimization Tips

A website should be built for the Internet user and not mainly for search engines and web directories. In the effort to obtain a good web site ranking search engine optimisation is often exaggerated. This over-optimization can then lead to a deterioration in the rankings or even expulsion from the search engines' indexes.

You can find good introductions to the topic of search engine optimization e.g. at Google itself. The following is a brief overview of proved methods of search engine optimisation, recommended by the search engine operators themselves:

• Keyword Analysis:  Anyone planning a website on a particular topic should first investigate which search terms Internet users would key in (Keyword Research / Analysis). Additionally, ask friends and acquaintances which keywords they would use for their search. Then simply enter these keyword suggestions in a search engine and look at the first three search results / websites source code (browser menus View / Source or View / Page Source). The contents of the meta-tags title, description and keywords will show you which keywords were important to the website managers.
• Keyword Distribution:  Your website should contain the most important keyword / keyword phrases to a reasonable extent. In the beginning it is to your disadvantage to focus on too many or highly competitive keywords. Avoid an excessive accumulation of keywords (so-called Keyword Stuffing) in seo-relevant website elements. A reasonable Keyword Density is reached at 4 - 6 %.
• SEO-Relevant Website Elements:  It has a strong effect on the ranking, if the domain name already contains an important keyword (e.g. www.important-keyword.co.uk). In addition, you can also provide the file names of your web pages and the directories of your web space with single important keywords (../keyword-images/keyword-yourshop.jpg or keyword-contact.html). N.B. the individual words must be separated by a hyphen or they are not recognized by the search engine spiders. The most important keywords should appear in the meta-tags title, description and keywords. In the meta-tag keywords you should list only keywords / keyword combinations which are visible in your website text - in lower case and separated by commas. Use important keywords in headings, text and lists, also in navigation links / -buttons and internal text links. Search engines cannot read out any text from images, but you can give these an additional description with the alt attribute. When using the keywords please always keep in mind that it mainly comes to generating useful and informative content for the Internet user, not just a series of keywords. The latter will be detected by the search engines and is regularly punished by a worse ranking.
• Page and Menu Structure:  The search engines reward a clear and concise page and menu structure. If you think of using JavaScript for your page navigation, please be aware that some Internet users will have disabled JavaScript in their browsers. In that case they cannot access the other pages of the website. The flatter the hierarchy of your website, the better it is indexed by the search engines (which is why it should not contain more than 4 levels).
• Link Building:  The link structure of your website should be build carefully and continually. A too rapid increase of incoming links will generally be evaluated negatively by the search engines (see link farms). Start - if it fits the content - linking to some important topic-related sites (so-called authorities or expert sites). In the final result none of your web pages should consist of more than 10 - 15 outbound links. In addition, you should seek incoming links from other domains in the initial phase, not more than 2-5 links a day though. Otherwise, the search engines wil become suspicious again.

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