Is your website search engine friendly?

Time and time again, I hear from our clients: “How can I get my webpage listed higher in Google?”.

We all know web surfers typically don’t look beyond the first results page of a search. So a higher ranking is going to provide your business with more exposure and will likely lead to increased visits to your website.

Back to basics – search engines trawl the web for content that they then run through a complex set of algorithms.These algorithms give your content a ranking for any given search phrase. What you need to identify are the words a user is likely to enter into a search engine to find what you have to offer. These words are known as ‘keywords’.

While the exact formula that search engines use when rating a webpage is a closely guarded secret, keywords are known to play an important role. So how can you put this to work for you and your business?

Firstly, you’ll want to ensure the elements that make up your webpage target your keywords.  Working from the top of your webpage, the first of these elements is the page title (as located at the top of your browser window).

A page title typically lists the name of the company on each webpage. This effectively tells a search engine that the content of your webpages relates to your company’s name.

This is all well and good if a web user is searching for your products by your company name, but not so if they’re searching by a common phrase. And we both know which tends to be the more likely.

Inserting your keywords into the page title will tell a search engine that your webpage correlates directly to the particular keywords chosen.

Another often over looked element of a webpage is the file name of the page. Too often webpages are named randomly or with little thought. A good practice is to name your webpage with the appropriate keyword for the content it will contain. Not only is this important for preferential ranking within search engines, but the webpage file name also makes up part of your web address (or URL).

For example, if I save my webpage as ‘Export_Strategy’, the URL for this page would be:www.austrade.gov.au/Export_Strategy. You should also be mindful as to how long your URL is registered for. Search engines want to see one that has been, and is going to continue to be, around for a while.

Example of the keywords Export Strategy in the title and web address

Content is king on the web, as it is when it comes to search engines. Yet, sadly, I’ve found that while many clients put their energy into writing a substantial amount of content for their websites, they overlook their keywords completely.

Write content to meet the needs of your customers and, in doing so, include the appropriate keywords for and within your content. Try to get a density of around 3 to 5 per cent. For example, if you write 100 words on the webpage, you’d want to use your keyword three to five times.

Another tip is to include the keyword in your heading and navigation, if this is appropriate. However, don’t be tempted to overdo this thinking you’ll gain better results. Search engines are smart,and will reduce your ranking if they think you’re abusing their ranking system.

Now that we’ve covered the visible areas of your website, it’s important to address the areas that only appear in the code of your webpage. Search engines view this code, looking for particular tags known as ‘metatags’. While metatags abound, there are only two that we’re specifically interested in. These are the ‘description tag’ and the ‘keyword tag’.

The ‘description tag’, as it suggests, allows you to write a description of your website and its offerings. You can rewrite this for every individual webpage of your website. This is useful as this is the text that appears in search engine results under your webpage’s title. It’s a golden opportunity to communicate your offerings and, if written well, should include a keyword.

Google search result displaying the page title and the webpage’s description

The ‘keyword tag’ logically relates to your keywords. Again, you’ll want to place words that are related to your content on the page. Here, you can place up to 30 words. However, don’t spend too much time on this. In the early days of the internet, this was a highly important feature, although its value to search engines has largely been lost in recent times.

Code view with red text box highlighting the description & keywords meta tags

The final piece of the puzzle relates to links.

There seems to be a great deal of confusion around this issue. In short, for your search engine rating, it’s more important to receive links than it is to give them out. The most beneficial links are called ‘anchored text links’. These essentially do the job of reinforcing your keywords.

An anchored text link looks like this: ‘export strategy‘. A search engine will see the keywords ‘export strategy’ and will relate the linked website to those words. And remember not all links are created equal, links from government bodies, industry groups or websites that have an established credibility in the market place have a higher value then those from an unknown website.

See how Austrade has used all these elements to create a high rating page based on the keywords ‘export strategy’.