[S191]Search Engine Optimisation Courses

Search engine optimisation is currently becoming a very lucrative industry for those who have the skills to carry out optimisation effectively. Put simply, the process involves maximising the traffic that goes to a website from search engine channels. This maximising of traffic increases a websites ranking in the eyes of the search engine and hence makes you a more popular choice by users who are more likely to choose sites at the top of the list of results.

The factors you must consider when undertaking search engine optimisation are; the keywords that you use, for instance these are the words that are most likely to be entered into a search engine when looking for your type of product. The title of your page is important as this is the first thing the search engine reads of your site, hence relevance is extremely important.

The description of your site is the second piece of information a search engine reads and once again has to be relevant. The text on your site is also important in terms of relevance and worth for a search engine to rank it highly. Links to your site from other sites will also help increase the popularity of your site.

When in the process of search engine optimisation selecting your keywords carefully is imperative. Obviously you must find keywords that people are likely to type into search engines. These keywords must be placed within the page to achieve high rankings; it is worth remembering however that phrases rather than single words make for better search engine optimisation. This is because more people tend to search using phrases rather than single words. These keywords should be included on all of the pages and it may even be worth including misspellings if these words are hard to spell.

It is also worth including these keywords and phrases in the title tag, the majority of search engines place high regard on the titles as these are the first piece of information they read when calculating rankings. The most important keywords should be included on the tags on your homepage while internal pages should have the less popular search terms in place. The title for each page should also be unique as most search engine spiders will place importance on the unique information on each site.

The description once again should include keywords in an easily readable sentence. As human users rather than spiders will read this information making it legible is important to increase traffic. The same can be said for content, while spiders will pick up on content, it is the human user who will find the content most useful. This content should be truly unique and well written as duplication is a big mistake when undertaking optimisation. A minimum of two hundred words per page is a helpful guideline to follow as the amount of content on a site is also important.

Linking from other sites is of vital importance and will increase your search engine rankings. This form of optimisation will help in two ways, while it increases your rankings and relative popularity as a site, it should also increase traffic through these links. A blog can also help increase the popularity of your site.

Some methods of optimisation and website design will however harm your rankings. These include placing complicated Flash displays and dynamic URLs that make your site harder to read for search engine spiders. Also by including keywords in your tags that have no relation to the information present will also harm your rankings by disregarding relevance principles.

Search engine optimisation is a complicated process and this article has just scratched the surface of the methods used in the industry. By pursuing these strategies you are optimising in an ethical or 'white hat' way, at all costs you should avoid following strategies of 'black hat' SEO. 'Black hat' methods will ultimately harm your rankings as search engines pick up on the unscrupulous methods employed. It is always worth employing an SEO company that will pursue ethical forms of optimisation for true rankings and increased traffic over an extended period of time.