Ten tips for making page one

Posted by Aaron Brockhurst on 9 July 2009

Tags: Search Engine Optimisation, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Website Design, SEO

One of the questions we're most often asked is "What can I do to get my website onto page one of the search engines?". There are several things that you can do yourself which will help your search engine ranking and we thought we'd share 10 of them with you.  These are all on our checklist when we evaluate a website and it's search engine performance before we start promoting, building links and increasing traffic. They're also the most common items that we correct in our client's websites.

Research your keywords and search terms

Find out what people are looking for in your market and what words and phrases they are using to find it. Dont assume that because that you know how people will find you in the search engines because they would use the same words and phrases you would use. Quite often we find that the search term our client thinks someone would use is not the the one the majority of people do use. Spend time identifying which are the most popular searched keywords and phrases relevant to your business or industry, which have the most search volume and which are the most targeted. There are plenty of programs and websites that will provide this keyword analysis for you. Unfortunately this is an essential time consuming job that needs to be done on a regular basis.

Keyword rich content

Whilst the content in your website should be relevant to what your company or the message you are trying to convey you want to research what people are looking for and ensure that your content contains the keywords that relate to the searches people are doing. For instance if you are a Fitness Coach write content for your website that is relevant to "Fitness Coaching". At the same time make sure that you have written content that is about "Fitness Training", "Exercise regimes", "Training routines","Physical exercise" and so on. If you specialise in Boxercise or Marathon training write content around those areas. You should make sure that you write at least one page of around 500 words for each of your primary keywords and that the title of the page starts with your primary keyword. Where possible start the first sentence and end the last sentence with this keyword. Make sure that your content is readable, makes sense and engages the reader. If you stuff your content full of keywords and it doesn't make any sense when people arrive at your website they're likely to have a bad user experience and avoid you in future. The key is one page per primary keyword and write something that's engaging, useful and relevant.

Incoming links

Search engines analyse incoming links to your website and rank your content according to the relevance of the link and where the link is coming from. Writing content that other websites link to is a great way of boosting your websites search engine position. To get the most impact you should make sure that the text link on the website linking to yours contains the primary keyword to the page that it's linking to. Using our Fitness Coach website as our example and for the purposes of this example the BBC wrote an article about them and their boxcerise classes. It would be great if the BBC put a link on their website titled "Fitness Coach Boxcercise Classes" and linked it to the Boxercise information page. At this point it's important to make sure that you check out the people linking to your site, especially if you are going to link back to them. We regularly advise clients to be careful who they link to and to make sure that they are linking to a genuine relevant site. By linking to another website your are giving it your approval and encouraging your viewers to go to it.

Research your competitors

Research your competitors. Once you know how people are searching look at what your competitors are doing, whose linking to them, who they link to, what their keywords are. If you're not getting the positions on page one look at the content they have and write content of your own around those topics. Do not copy their content.

Dont put your content in flash

Flash websites can look fantastic and can have a great user experience. The search engines however aren't great at reading content that's embedded in a flash movie file. This means that if your website is entirely flash based the search engines are unlikely to index and you're unlikely to be found in the searches relevant to your keywords. In our opinion the best thing to do is to design your website so that the content is outside of the flash file. It's also worth noting that flash websites aren't great for accessibility and if you build a flash based website you should build an accessible version. Also, at the time of writing this, flash cannot be viewed on an iPhone or Blackberry. If you really must have a flash website consider building another non flash feeder website that will drive viewers to the flash site.

Coding

Get your website developer to write clean, search engine friendly code, with the content clearly identified. Put all javascript in include files (they'll know what this means) and make sure that every page has the following html tags at the very least: Title, meta keywords, meta description, h1. It's important to make sure that you developer builds your website so that it is accessible. This means making sure that your images have appropriate alt attributes and your links have title attributes and that the text you put in these has the correct primary keywords. For instance on your links you want to make sure that the link title attribute has the primary keyword of the page it is linking to and your image alt attribute has the primary keyword of the page you are on and accurately describes what the image is. However don't spam every link on your page with the same keyword. Companies have been delisted from the search engines indexes for doing this. At this point we'd recommend that you invest in a Content Management System which allows you to focus on writing the content and is set up to do all of the above for you. For more information see the Content Management Systems or the eCommerce sections of our website.

File and image naming conventions

Whenever and wherever possible make sure that your page name contains your primary keyword and that any images contain the primary keyword. For example if your keyword is West Ham Football Shirt name your page west-ham-football-shirt.html and your image, west-ham-football-shirt.jpg. Going back to my previous point about coding make sure that the link to the page has a title attribute of "West Ham Football Shirt" and that the image has an alt attribute along the lines of "Picture of West Ham Football Shirt"

Tell the search engines about your site

One of the most common things we find when talking to companies is that they haven't submitted their website to the search engines.  In the offline world we dont wait for out clients to find us.  We actively market, promote ourselves, pitch or even sell our products and services to them.  It's the same in the online world.  If you dont tell the search engines about you're website you're hoping with everything crossed that they are going to find you.  All of the search engines have a well documented website submission process.  The major Search engine like Google and Yahoo also allow you to submit an xml sitemap of links to tell them about the pages in your website.  All good Content Management Systems will build this for you.  If you dont have one there are several tools online that will index your website and build one for you.

Regularly update your website or write a blog

All of the search engines love regularly updated websites. Keep the content fresh by adding something every 2 to 4 weeks. A great way of doing this is to have a news section.  However old, out of date news never looks good.  An even better way is to write a blog.  We recommend writing something at least once a week.  Use these tips to write keyword rich content that's informative and useful to the reader.

Seek professional help

Getting to page one is only part of the battle.  Maintaining that position can take just as much effort.  All of the companies that use our Search team do so because they recognise that getting their website found is not their core skill and often they just too busy running their business and dont have the time to focus on this one task. This is where employing a third party who specialises in this can help.  Our advice is always find a company that you like, understand your business and have the skills to do more than just get you on page one.

At Covenant Solutions we do much more than search engine optimisation and promotion.  Read Search Engine Optimisation or Website Analytics and Metrics for more information the services we offer at Covenant Solutions or for a free evaluation of your website complete the form on the Search Engine Services page.