Search Engine Optimisation | SEO Advice & Facts
There are 5 principle factors to successful long-term search engine optimisation:
Good Clean Coding
Websites designed with web design software or pre-designed templates are usually full of errors, unnecessary formatting and editing restrictions that make optimisation difficult.
Search engine bots can't crawl a page and register the content correctly if there are errors.
CSS Div Tags
Reducing the coding of each page to exclude any formatting of style (font style, colours, layout/positioning) increases the density of your actual content within the page's structure, making it easier for the search engine bot to register the content.
The use of Div tags and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) ensures that all the formatting for the style of the page and layout is located on an external document which the search engine bot does not need to crawl.
'Genuine' Search Term Density
A page or site that is genuinely rich in content relative to the prime search terms will be valued more highly by the search engines.
Deliberate over-use of the search terms within the content of the page or site can be detected by the search engine bots and seen as 'spamming' or 'over-optimisation' resulting in penalisation or even exclusion from the search engines index.
High quality content is good reading and will sustain interest from the visitor and therefore increases the possibility of the visitor proceeding to make contact.
Good Mapping
Search engine bots 'crawl' a site by scanning the code of the home page (index page) registering the content and follow onward links to other pages.
Broken links or links to a page that does not have links back to other pages result in minimal registration of the site.
The navigation for the website should be well defined and the creation and submission of a site-map will ensure that the search engine bot can crawl the entire site with ease and register all pages.
Inbound Links
Links coming from external sites that are themselves rich in relevant content and with good search engine performance will significantly increase the value of the website to some search engines. Google is known to value inbound links from quality content rich sites.
It is possible to buy inbound links, or to join a link exchange network - but these only result in links that may actually penalise or ban your site from some search engines. It is quality not quantity that matters here, but quantity of quality is even better!
Approaching websites that are relevant and requesting that they link to your site, in exchange for a link back to them, is referred to as a 'reciprocal link exchange'. This has become very common practice in manipulating search engines - and the search engines are not easily fooled for long! A one-way link is more valuable as it is more likely that the link is a genuine recommendation to one site from another, without it being solicited by the site agreeing to link back.
For best results, find a balance of inbound links that are reciprocal and one-way. Reciprocal links with quality and relevant websites are worth having, provided that there are some one-way links also.
A website that is informative and has value to the visitor should result in some inbound one-way links where the website is genuinely being recommended.
