9 October 2009
Top 10 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Tips
A page title is the first thing that search engines look at to see what the page is about. Its important to make it relevant, include a few keywords but don’t over do it, and give each page a different title. Otherwise users won’t be able to distinguish pages, and this hinders bookmarking. There are 2 main meta tags Keywords and Description. Some search engines actually ignore keywords due sites over using it, but it’s still a good idea to put some keyword in. It’s debatable whether the description actually helps your ranking but it’s very important as it shows up in search engines. This should read as a sentence and should be a brief introduction into your company /site. These help search engines and your users find out what your site it about, and saves them reading information they are not interested in. Your most important title should be the biggest heading (H1) and then sub titles can be placed in smaller headings (H2, H3). Putting Alt tags on your images is now essential. It gives you a chance to feed extra information to search engines and you need them on all images to make your site validate as xhtml transitional. These tags will allow the visually impaired to know what is on your site. These are the little pop-ups that appear when you hover over something like a link or an image. This is a little tip that can really help your ratings. A good example would be to have a link that says “contact us” , you could insert a title “contact one of our sales assistants” – it actually describes what the link is. Make sure that your content is relevant to the page and to you keywords. It is important to incorporate your keywords into your content but it should also read well and actually make sense. It’s not good to stick as many keywords in as possible and have content that doesn’t make sense – this won’t get you anywhere. There are many factors that effect your ranking but links are a huge factor. Try to get as many links to your site as possible but only from reputable sites that have something to do with your site. Don’t join link farms, search engines will actually rate you down if you use these. This technically isn’t SEO but it’s very important when thinking about promoting your site. Millions of people use things like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace every day so its important to utilise these services, especially as they are free. This can either by a sitemap that helps your users navigate through your site, or an XML one that is used by search engines to index your site. This will help search engines find your site easier, and you can create one free using Google’s webmaster tools. The main 2 to avoid are Flash and Splash pages. Flash sites may look nice but search engines cant read them, so lots of people won’t be able to find your site. Splash pages just create an extra click for users, which annoys a lot of people – myself included. Often people use the 2 together, forcing the user to either skip intro – meaning you’ve wasted all that money on flash for nothing, or to leave your site completely – you’ve just lost a potential customer (me included).
Here at Trigger we will fully optimise your site to give you the best rankings possible. For more info contact me contact me or visit my site for a free no obligation quote Web Design Agency Brighton, UK
1. Title Tag
2. Meta Tags
3. Heading Tags
4. Alt tags on Images
5. Title Attributes
6. Content
7. Link Building
8. Social Media
9. Sitemap
10. Things to avoid
Top 10 Content Writing Tips
No one wants to read boring content, so make it interesting. People don’t spend much time reading text so get to the point, keep it short and sweet. The first paragraph is crucial, if it’s dull and boring your customer will go else where. Only provide the necessary information, if people have further questions they can always contact you. There is nothing worse than visiting a website and the first thing you see is “Loading”. You’ve lost me as a customer straight away. Keep your site simple; use HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for quick loading times. Don’t clutter your site with Flash banners and flashing text, they may look nice but do they actually add anything to your site? Use headings and sub heading to split up your text. It helps the user find what they are looking for quickly. Try to write one paragraph at a time, keeping them as short as possible. What will people type into a search engine to find you? These are your “keywords”. Search engines consider headings, page titles, bold and linked text to be more important so try to get your keywords into these. The most important thing about your site is that without people viewing your site it is useless. Put your website on all of your letterheads, adverts and emails to get as many people to your site as possible. Ask other sites to link to yours, preferably ones that are within the same industry or that have some link to your business. Make sure the link they create has some of your keywords in it. An example could be a company in Sussex that sells Apple Juice could ask Tesco for a link that says “Apple Juice Sussex” which links to their site. They take longer to load and they don’t look much nicer. Plus they are not search engine friendly. Most people associate underlined text as a link. Use underlines or some other way to make it obvious where your links are. On the flip side never underline text if it’s not a link, this will only confuse people. Before making your site live make sure you use Spell Check on your content and get someone else to read through it. Grammar and spelling mistakes can make your company look very unprofessional and could cost you sales. If you have a site that is based on advertising then this won’t apply to you, but for other sites banners provide a quick option for people to leave your site instantly. If you do decide to have advertising banners, try to make sure they are relevant to your business. Here at Trigger we can help you all the way with your content so feel free to contact us or visit my site for a free no obligation quote www.triggersolutions.co.uk
1. Interesting and to the point
2. Fast loading site
3. Structure your text
4. Keywords
5. Promotion
6. Link Building
7. Don’t use images instead of text
8. Make your links obvious
9. Double check your content
10. Avoid advertising on your site
6 October 2009
10 Steps to making a rubbish website!
Why pay for an expensive good looking site when you could just buy a cheap, rubbish looking site that looks like so many others. Spend loads of time and money on making your site move and playing music, annoying as many of your customers as possible. And don’t forget – search engines love flash! Let’s force our users to make an extra click for absolutely no reason. A complete waste of everyone’s time. Now that you have a website you certainly don’t want people to call or email you, they can find all the information on your site. So make your contact information as hard to find as possible. Who cares if your users want to know where the navigation is, just keep moving it around the page so they find it difficult to move around the site. An advert in a local newspaper for 1 day can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand pounds, so you should only expect to spend £200 on your website, I mean it’s only going to be online forever. Now it’s time to start thinking about how to make money from your rubbish site. Sign up for as many advertising programmes as you can. I’d especially recommend pop-ups as everyone likes them, and preferably explicit adverts to turn your clients away. As long as your site looks fine in Internet explorer it’s bound to look exactly the same in all the others, don’t bother checking. Everyone loves under construction pages, so just get the site live asap and people can waste their time staring at your unfinished pages. Just pick up a copy of something like Dreamweaver and away you go. You’ll have loads of extra code that you don’t need, as well as inline styles that just confuse you. Don’t bother with CSS who needs it! If you would like advice on to make a website that isn’t rubbish then contact me at info@triggersolutions.co.uk or visit my site for a free no obligation quote www.triggersolutions.co.uk
1. Buy a template from a cheap website
2. Use Flash
3. A Landing Page
4. Hide your contact details at all costs
5. Make the layout as inconsistent as possible
6. Spend as little money on the site as possible
7. Make your ads as intrusive as possible, ideally make sure they’re out of context
8. Test your site in just 1 browser
9. Don’t worry if the site isn’t finished. Launch it as quickly as possible
10. Use a WYSIWYG editor to code your site rather than wasting time learning HTML.
