It’s been said that a beautifully designed website without Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is like a billboard in the desert.  The odd person might stumble across it, but it’s unlikely to be exposed to the amount of traffic it needs to generate sales.

Actively optimising your site for search engines gives you the ability to be found at that key point where someone is actively looking for information, products or services. Your site’s content is always a good match with what the user is searching for because Google wants to provide relevant results. 

So there’s the first tip right there. Make your content relevant.  For example, if you wanted to rank highly for the search term "Best Restaurant Perth" then use that term frequently in your site content. 

Another way to make Google love you is to add ‘meta data’ to each page of your site. This is information in the code that computers can see but people can’t, telling Google what your site is all about. Google especially likes it when you add keywords specific to each page rather than the same words for every page of the site so give that a try to make the most of this tip!

Use descriptive page titles and URL paths. Don’t condemn your pages with titles such as ‘home’ and ‘about’, go for something specific to your content such as “Webarena Homepage : Best Website Design Perth”.

Here’s one that will help humans too - keep the structure of your site simple and organised.  Search engines like to be able to see exactly where everything is. Have your main menu accessible at all times, and use drop-downs for sub-pages. A sitemap is an additional way to make this easy.

Reciprocal links will help drive more traffic your way. Think of your website like a node on a network, where the connections between your site and everyone else’s are hyperlinks.  Search engines jump from site to site via these hyperlinks, so if you’ve got a lot of connections in and out you’re going to be found quicker, and more frequently. 

This helps explain why listing in an online directory such as yellow pages can help increase traffic – it immediately connects you with a stack of other websites.  Of course the fact that the directories are a good search tool drawing users themselves adds to the effectiveness of this technique. Bear in mind that a relevant directory or site displaying your link will be a whole lot more effective than an unrelated site. For instance if you’re a plumber, listing on a trade directory such as tradeconnect.com.au would be a lot more effective than listing on something more general such as hotfrog.

As you can see, SEO is not rocket science. If you have control over your own website content you are likely to be able to implement many if not all of these optimisation strategies yourself. However, actively optimising your site, then monitoring and maintaining your results can be time consuming. Remember that your time is worth a lot. You may find that tracking down and expert who can look after your SEO for you is the best way to go.  On that, it’s worth noting that rankings can’t really be guaranteed. You can pay a lot of money to be a ‘sponsored link’ but beware of anyone who guarantees organic rankings. Unless of course, they own Google! At Webarena we are working on integrating some tools to semi-automate SEO which we may be including free with our web packages so stay tuned for more information on that. 

Whatever you decide, take away this – a website is a great investment, but it’s the SEO that makes it pay off.