SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the art of developing a website so that it is considered to be Search Engine Friendly. In order to improve the volume or quality of traffic directed to the site. A website which can be properly read by the search engine spiders stands an improved chance of achieving desirable results in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)! A key goal to SEO is to understand what the search engines are looking for and where they award the greatest credibility

Search engines rank a website in the SERP based on a variety of factors. One factor may affect the ranking more then another. Search engines can weight these factors separately, depending on what it considers to be of more importance. However, the algorithms and weightings search engines use to rank pages constantly evolve and change, this constantly developing area means you need a proper set of tools under your belt to help keep things moving in the right direction!

Some websites I find useful to analyse websites myself include:

• Possibly my favourite analysis tool Google Analytics, simple to install, simple to use, simple to understand! Find out who your target users are and what common trends exist
• 404 pages are always a nasty sight! Clean up any broken links, IWebTool Broken Link Checker is a great way to spot those broken links. I also recommend you create a custom 404 page! This may help reduce viewers bouncing on and then straight back off your site, allowing them to redirect themselves to a page of your choosing, a sitemap or homepage may be a good link to provide here
• For determining where sites rank for particular keywords in various SERPs is mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports
• Google are also here to help again! Use Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas! Ideally look for words which have a high search volume but lower advertiser competition! Wordtracker is another great tool for keywords inspiration!
• IWebTool Keyword Density Check is also another handy tool for checking how often keywords occur on a page
• Backlinks can be a huge influence to your page rank! I use IWebTool Backlink Checkerand Backlink Watch to monitor my backlinks!

Areas of good practise and some common things which, I believe, can help influence your search engine rankings are:

• Page Titles
  • These should reflect the content of the page, including primary keywords. Primary words should be placed first in order to gain maximum weighting
• Meta Tags (not used as a factor of ranking by all search engines)
  • Meta Keyword tags, should list 4 or 5 individual keywords related to the page you have created
  • Consider pluralising meta keywords, this may allow some spiders to pick up both the pluralised and singular derivative of a keyword
  • Meta Description tags, should be a short description describing exactly what the page is about. This is very important! It is used by spiders to weight your page for keywords and also to allow the search engines display this for humans when a person searches for the keyword used in the description!
• Javascript
  • Avoid using Javascipt for links, not all spiders can see them! Consider using CSS driven menus. If you absolutely MUST use Javascript drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow
• Keywords
  • The inclusion of keywords in the Domain name. For example a site which sells walking shoes to have the URL walking-shoes.co.uk
  • Once you have your site content in place, start keyword researching, rewrite some content to include keywords and phrases
  • You want a good ratio of keywords in your content. Too little and you may not get ranked for the words you wish, too many and your site will be negatively weighted for spamming!
• Headings
  • The main page heading of the page should use your keywords and be in H1 tags. Working down the page you should use secondary headers, always using the keywords where possible
  • hgroup – an html element which can be used to group together associated headers.
• Content
  • The amount of content on a website may be used as a weight in the ranking of your site
  • Quality is just as important as quantity! Create as much content about your products or subject as you can, but keep it relative to the topic!
  • Fresh content! Where possible update content of your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site
  • Focus on search phrases, not just single keywords
  • Add your location in your text, “Our Lancashire Stores” not “Our Stores”, to get found in local searches
  • Spiders can crawl text but not Flash or images!
  • Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results!
  • Spelling! Content will never be found if it’s not correct – double check your spellings before publishing a page
  • Avoid copying content from other websites, search engines such as Google see this as duplicate content and thus don’t give it as much weighting as it might otherwise achieve
• Images
  • In the Alt and Title attributes describe the image using keywords
  • Compress images where possible to reduce loading times
• Links
  • In the Title attributes describe the link using keywords
  • Be sure links within and to your site use your keyword phrases. In other words don’t just use “Click here”
  • Backlinks can contribute serious weighting for your page rank! Links from a highly page ranked site are golden! High page rank indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight!
  • Backlinks to “linkfarms” and poorly ranked sites can actually be a negative weighting on your ranking
  • Viral networking! Viral components to your web site – facebook groups, tweets, reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc can produce a mass of traffic and links to your site!
• Speed (Some search engines use the web site load speed as a ranking factor)
  • Minify css and js – removing non-essential characters such as spaces can dramatically reduce the size of these files. Giving clients less to download to achieve the same goal
  • Combine files where possible such as multiple css or js files. Doing this can reduce the overall overhead when downloading a website
  • Optimise images – compress images to reduce their size
  • Set expiration dates for file types which won’t be updated regularly such as images to be substantially in the future, such as a month or more, so they are cached by client for as long as possible.