DIY SEO Hints and Tips

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation Guide

Welcome to Digital Pacific's do it yourself SEO hints and tips section. For those that are unfamiliar with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), the concept basically means to optimise your website for a better position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

Website owners are often left wondering why their web page:

Does not appear in Google,
Appears in Google below their main competitors, or
Receives very little or no traffic from search engines

Complex algorithms control how web pages appear in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. However, taking some simple steps to optimise your web page can instantly improve your ranking. At a very basic level this guide aims to make you a little more knowledgeable in SEO, as well as give away some free tips to help get you started.

Optimising Your Web Page Title

There are still so many web pages on the internet that have their page title as "untitled page", "home page" or "index page". Make sure that your website does not fall under this category as this is a key component of ranking in search engines.

To find out the title of your website, open any browser and simply check the very top of the page above the file | edit menus. If you look at the top of this page, for example, you will notice the title is "Seo Hints and Tips". Alternatively, if you have access to the html code, the title of a page will appear wrapped in title tags:
HTML Code:
< title > Seo Hints and Tips < /title >

Your web page title should outline the contents of the page while also incorporating some of your main keywords. Another good tip is to try and keep the title less than 65 characters, including spaces.

Web Page Meta Description

A Meta description can be either a sentence or paragraph briefly outlining the summary of the web page. Search engines will often use this information in search results underneath the web page title.
The diagram below is a snapshot of this web page in Google's SERPS.

HTML Code:
< meta name="description" content="Just by being a valuable Digital Pacific customer, we share our SEO hints and tips with you so you can improve the performance of your website yourself. DIY SEO!" / >

An enticing meta description will attract visitors to click on your web page in the SERPS, so it's crucial to include an appropriate description of your page and incorporate some of your main keywords.

Web Page Meta Keywords

Meta keywords define the keywords you would like to rank for. Try to stick to approximately 5-8 appropriate, well-related keywords (directly for the page you are optimising). Please note that keywords in your meta tag should also appear on your web page. Meta keywords used for our website include:

HTML Code: < meta name="keywords" content="Seo Hints and Tips, Seo, Search Engine Optimisation, Serps, Search Engine Analysis" / >

Link Building

Link building is a pivotal part of search engine optimisation. Search engines count links from one web page to another as a vote. The more votes you have, generally speaking, the higher up in the SERPS your site will be. There are a few key points to observe before participating in link building of any kind:

You should only get links from websites that relate to yours.
For example: There is no point in getting a link from a poker website if your website’s topic involves shoes.
As a general rule of thumb you don't want a link from a page that already has 50 outbound links. (Links out to 50 or more other pages)
Quality link partners are more important than the quantity of link partners.
Do not submit your website to webpages that are link farms. (A link farm can be defined as a web page which was designed to only accept incoming links, seen by the search engines as a form of spam.)

Providing Quality, Updated Content

Search engines give bonus points to websites that are frequently updated and provide useful quality content. Google and other search engines want the 'BEST' and latest information and will rank a website higher for doing so.

Please be advised that Digital Pacific has put this information here as a very BASIC guide only.