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By Martin Kerrigan from myDreamDesigns.com

Part 3

Welcome to the third part of our series of articles on getting the best out of your website. If anyone missed parts 1 and 2, published originally in the Paphos Scene magazine, you can catch up with them online at www.scenethenews.com

This month’s topics are effective linking strategies and some of the pitfalls to look out for with some of the less reputable search engine optimisation tactics.

Linking Strategies

Despite abuse of the system in recent times via the development of “link farms” of pages of largely irrelevant links, search engines still rely heavily on inbound links to help them establish the authority and relevance of a site. A useful way of building your own links network is to make use of social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, to build a community of users and visitors – an established “Group” for your business on one of these sites will help generate visits from both potential customers and search engine robots. It is also worth considering setting up and maintaining a blog to raise your profile and help highlight any new products or services.

Keep it above board!

As with most things, there is often a temptation to cheat with search engine rankings, and a number of less reputable companies are around that will make bold claims about the results they can achieve for your site’s ranking. However, the search engines are increasingly becoming alert to the possible short-cuts, and will punish offending sites harshly. A clear line exists between what is termed “White Hat” optimisation, including the legitimate strategies outlined above, and “Black Hat” tactics, which aim to trick the search engines into ranking a site inappropriately. Black Hat techniques to watch out for include hidden content, pages of irrelevant links and repetitive meta-tags, and if anyone recommends approaches such as these for your site it is recommended you give them a very wide berth!

For more information on search engine optimisation, or a free review of your site’s current status, please contact info@mydreamdesigns.com

Part 2

Last month we talked about the basics in checking to see if your website is properly configured for accessibility to the search engines, in order to ensure you’re getting the best exposure possible.

Well by now you should have checked that everything is OK, and taken any remedial action where necessary; delaying this will only hurt you in the long term, because if the search engines establish that your site isn’t properly built then the frequency with which they return to check on it can be greatly reduced. The longer you leave any remedial action, the more time it will then take to have an effect.

So what else can you do to try and give yourself an edge in the shadowy world of search engine optimisation? This month, we’re looking at 2 very important factors – sitemaps and links.

Sitemaps

As the name sounds, this is basically a dedicated page which lists all of the pages available on your site, and is very important in ensuring that all of your pages are successfully located and listed. Not only will your site’s users find this useful, but it is also one of the first pages the search engines will be looking for. The page should have a title tag of simply “sitemap”, and can be either in the same format as the rest of the site (HTML, PHP etc) or for more advanced users a specialised XML sitemap can also be built and uploaded to your webserver, and then submitted directly to Google. It is very important that you link to this page from your Home page, preferably from somewhere near the top of the page.

Links

Possibly the most important factor in establishing the prominence of your site is building a strong network of inbound links. To be most effective, these links should be relevant to your own site, in terms of either content and/or location, and the best links are those with a high PageRank. (a number between 0-10 assigned to every site by Google, and representing a quick measure of Google’s opinion of the importance of that site – download yourself a copy of the free Google toolbar if you haven’t already, and you can then monitor the PageRank of every site you visit). The search engines keep a close eye on the number and quality of links to your site, and if they like what they see they will assume you are an authority in your particular field, and rank you accordingly.

This doesn’t just mean that you should recklessly acquire as many links as possible, they need to be relevant, and you also must be very careful to avoid being linked in any way to “bad neighbourhoods” (gambling, pornography sites etc.) as this can have an adverse effect on your own site – if you are linked to a site that is blacklisted (i.e. removed completely) by the search engines you run the risk of sharing their fate, and there’s little or no recovery from that point.

Next month – More on effective linking strategies, and the key importance of the difference between “white hat” and “black hat” search engine optimisation tactics!
 

Part 1

It's one thing paying to have a website for your business designed and published, but if it isn't constructed properly then you could be wasting an awful lot of time and effort.

A couple of quick things to check to see if your site is on the right track:

- Are you properly listed in the search engines? Google is by far the most popular search engine, so this is the best place to check. Try a Google search for site:yourdomain.com and see how many pages are returned. It can take a few months for Google to fully explore your site, so don't worry too much if you don't get many results for a new site, but if your site has been out there for a while and Google isn't listing the majority of your pages then you may have a problem.

- That problem is most likely to be the coding of your site - when they check out your site, the search engines are looking for Meta tags built into the code of the site that should tell them what they need to know to be able to rank it properly. There are three main Meta tags of interest; the Title, Description and Keywords tags. There are a few ways you can check yours, but the easiest is probably to right click your mouse on an empty area of the page you're interested in, and select the option "View Source". This will show you a new window with the code for that page in it. You're looking towards the top of this page for something that looks like this:




If it isn't there, or if the information in there is minimal or inaccurate then you need to resolve this quickly, as a site incorrectly or inaccurately coded isn't going to work anywhere near its full potential.

A common shortcut is to put identical data in the tags for all the pages on a site, which kind of defeats the object. If this has been done on your site, it will become quickly apparent when you do the site: search above, as the results will all look the same.

So once you've checked the basics are correct and in place, is there anything else you can do to maximize the performance of your website? Well, there are lots of things actually, but you're going to have to wait to find out! Check out next month's issue of Paphos Scene for our top tips on search engine optimisation.

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