SEO Tips
There is plenty of rubbish written on the internet and spouted by Search Engine Optimization companies, the likes of whom call me at least twice a week to offer their services for some of my sites without them even having looked at the site to see what can be improved or more importantly perhaps what I do that would want promoting better to the search engines.
I will attempt to summarise here the tips we would give to anyone trying to do their own SEO, if you don't understand any of this, drop us a line and we'll give you a no obligation assessment of what we would do to your site.
Most company owners want the company name or a variation on it to be their domain name as such, part of their web site address. Whilst this may serve to aid identification of the site for someone who is looking for you by name it doesn't really help with getting you noticed for your most important search term.
Have relevant page names
The next best thing you can do is to use relevant page names, don't call your product pages product.htm?code=1 user meaningful names like food_mixers_for_sale.htm.
Ensure your site contains relevant content
Good SEO is no longer about stuffing Keywords into Meta Tags and getting more in than the competition its now about having relevant content that customers want to see , suppliers can link to and best of all oocasionally the competition will have to use or link to.
Use Title, Keywords and Description Meta Tags
Take a look at any of the pages on this site, the Title, Description and Keywords are chosen carefully to guide the user (and helpfully) the search engines to where you want them to be.
You should ensure your site is developed to World Wide Web Consortium [W3C] standards, and that the HTML, XML and css used in the site is valid, this will ensure portability and give the search engines a much better chance of spotting the difference between the content and the markup.
Make proper use of header tags
Learn about how documents can be better structured using <h1> and similar tags and their importance in ranking your pages.
Use Google Maps
Have inbound links from 'subject relevant' sites
You Pagerank (like a score Google keeps of your pages) will increase the more other sites link to a particular page, it will decrease the more you link out to other pages from your page(s).
The Sitemaps Protocol is a specification for an XML file each website can implement to enable the search engines to find new content faster and to see what has not changed and not waste time reindexing it.
This is almost a no brainer, although it can consume time with testing the same things over and over on multiple platforms.