The Netmotivated Weblog

Search Engines and my website

More and more people are asking us the same question as they look to generate more business from their websites, ‘How do I get my site to appear higher in Google’.

‘Search Engine Optimisation’ or SEO for short is the term associated to the methods used to help web sites gain better rankings in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. However, it must be understood that such methods offer no guarantee of appearing higher in search engines, no matter what anyone says.

The rule of thumb is to focus equally on search engine optimisation and user optimisation. User optimisation is often overlooked and simply means that you should deliver your web page content clearly and concisely in a way that is both relevant to your core business and engaging to your visitors. Most people will just skim pages so focus on writing snappy text that gets your message across quickly without working your visitor too hard. You can put the detail on other pages and link to them from the ‘snappy’ pages, thus letting the user be more in control of the content they read.

There a number of other factors such as domain names, sitemaps, inbound links, keeping your content up to date, Meta Tags, use of code, etc that will impact your site’s visibility and position in Google search results. I strongly recommend you get information from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, by visiting the Google Webmaster Central pages http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ , be sure to check out ‘Webmaster Guidelines’.

Neil Duddridge
Netmotivated Ltd
http://www.netmotivated.co.uk

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