Search Engine Optimisation -- SEO Techniques & Tips

Over the years Shalom Software Web Designs have been refining their website development techniques.

Some things will come and go -- but what are implementing on Australian websites are true, tried and tested methods to maximise the clients' websites. This is especially the case/race to the highest possible search engine rankings in their market place, field or expertise.

SEO tips and techniques

Follow our proven tips and techniques to improve your search engine rankings. Applying these and other good website design practices have worked for our Australian clients. Be assured that Shalom Software Web Designs won't use any bad website design practices on your website.

Write quality content

People will visit your internet site if the search engine results pages show that your website has the information they are searching for.

The information they find needs to be original and clear. Write content that explains itself well. Intersperse the pages content with your chosen "keywords" or "key phrases" that you want your website to be found by.

Try to have only one main topic per page and keep paragraphs short. Most people "browse" the internet; they are skim reading -- so online, shorter paragraphs work better than long.

Search engines don't index the words of a graphic. You will need therefore to write in the html code what the meaning is using the img's tag ALT attribute. Also, instead of using just logo.gif try company-name-logo.gif as it provides more information as to what the image is.

Use logical page structure

It is very beneficial to write xhtml code that is marked up correctly. It is preferable to only add mark-up to aid the design after the content is written.

If a phrase is a heading, then mark it up as such eg. <h1>, <h2> through to <h6> etc. Don't write all the content within <h1> tags just because you might trick the search engines into thinking that your text must be very important as it is marked up as major heading -- this technique won't work (as others have found out).

If you want to emphasis a word or point, mark up that small portion of the text by using the <strong> or <em> tags -- then use the CSS to modify/control the visual appearance of the text.

Don't use tables to design and layout the site. We are in a new millennium so instead layout the page design using CSS. Format the normal xhtml markup with CSS so that extra tags are kept to a minimum.

As much as you can, separate the content from the design.

Follow suggestions from the web standards group

There is a volunteer group called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These people aim to make the web a safer, better, easier place. They published have a helpful list of quality tips for webmasters.

Some of the points the W3C make on their website are:

• <title>: the most important element of a quality Web page
• Never use "click here" as link text
• Use h1 for top-level headings
• Use the alt attribute to describe the function of each visual
• Don't forget to add the correct doctype
• Use <link>s in your document
• If You Pick One Colour, Pick Them All
• Take Care With Font Size
• Use the international date format
• Use headings to structure your document
• Unordered lists: more than just bullets

Utilise free SEO tools

Switch to using a better web browser like Firefox as it has many great time saving extensions especially for web developers and SEO research like CustomizeGoogle.

To gain a higher page rank, you will need to have many links back to your website. To see how you are going with link backs, you can use a Link Popularity Checker - providing free instant, online reports of a site's link popularity rating in 4 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN, and Teoma (Ask Jeeves).

Keep visitors informed

Don't loose your page ranking -- they are hard to come by -- and can't be bought.

When you move or rename a web page that has been indexed by a search engine, it is recommended that you put a redirection system/page in place so that any visits to the old page will be forward to the new location.

If you permanently remove a page and won't be replacing it, then your visitors would often get a 404 error page; meaning that the page that was requested couldn't be found.

It is also nice to have a custom looking error page that simply informs visitors that the page has been removed and offer them some options (a search box, sitemap or homepage link etc.) so that they can stay on your website.

Doing these things, especially the redirects, is good since the page you moved may have had a good page ranking that can be passed onto the new page (in time).

Shalom Software Web Designs want you to be a success

There are a lot of good website designs and bad website designs. We have written our own helpful list of what to or not to do when building a website.