Handy tips to increase your search engine ranking

Having a fantastic looking website is important, but if your website is not visible to the right people there is no point having it.

Achieving a high search engine ranking to pull in visitors is crucial to any business. SEO companies may make fantastic promises and often charge the earth, but there are several steps you can take yourself to help boost your search engine ranking:

1. Make sure your website is hosted on a fast reliable server. If you have a very slow loading webiste, this is a sure way to annoy the search engines. All pages on your website should load within a few seconds.

2. Coding – CSS not Tables. If you use a web design company or code the website yourself, make sure that CSS is used to control the layout and not tables. CSS is much more lightweight than tables, this means less code will make up each page. As a result your website will load faster and your keywords wont be diluted with lines of messy code.

A big positive, is that search engines tend to favour websites coded in CSS.

How to check if my site uses tables or css:

You can easily check if your website uses tables or CSS. View a page on your website and right click, then select view source. This will then open all the code which makes up your website in a text editor. Have a quick look through the code, if you see bits of code with look like this “<table … ” then you are using tables.

If you find code looking like this “<div  id=’name’></div>. Then your site is coded using CSS

3. Alt Tags on images. When you place images on your website, make sure you include alt tags on every image. A Alt tag is a description for the search engine of what the image is of. A good idea is to set the alt tag to a keyword relevant to your web page which you wish to appear in the search engines for.

4. A dedicated IP for your website. The server which your website sits on will have its own IP address. This is a unique number that identifies the web server where your website lives. Unless you have a dedicated server, you will share a IP address with everyone else the web hosting company puts on your server (this may be upto 100 other websites).

If one website on your server manages to get banned by a search engine, because they share the same IP address as you, this could affect your search engine ranking. To ensure that you are not affected by other people on your web server, make sure you ask your web host to provide a dedicated IP address. Mosts hosts will be able to provide this service very cheaply.

5. h1 h2 and h3 tags. Another method to help boost your search engine ranking is to ensure that your website contains H tags. These are titles which the search engines used to index and categorise your website. Each page on your website should include h1 h2 and h3 tags using relevant keywords to your website.

6. Meta Content. Meta content plays a crucial role in helping the search engine index your website. This section is hidden in the source code and contains your keywords, page titles and description. You need to ensure that every page on your website has unique meta tags that are relevant to your website.

7. Don’t copy text! Never Never copy text from other webistes. Doing so will get you penalised by the search engines. Make sure that all text on your website is your own work.

  Category: web hosting