Improving search engine hits/ optimization

[gangst]

Hi,

I would like some advice on how to improve search engine hits and how to optimise a website for search engines.

The website I am improving is http://www.smithosullivan.com

I currently am working part time for a small/medium sized company and have been given the job of tidying up their website. Whilst most of it is grammar etc, I need to improve the sites hits.

I have never done anything like this before but goggling reveals that:

• Individual page titles are very important - this site does not yet have them
• Meta data, especially description are important - this site does not have them
• Links between pages are very important - there are currently not many

I would like some advice on what else I need to do to help increase traffic, as I have never really done such a thing.


Thanks for any help.

 

[66217]

Besides what you already mentioned, I heard that using key words in the text of your site is good.

For example, my website is about photography, and I write like this: "The 105mm VR AF-S lens is bla bla bla, the 105 mm VR AF-S also has bla bla bla.
, another good thing of the 105mm VR AF-S is bla bla bla. The second and third time I could have used "this lens" instead of putting the whole name again, but apparently, repeating the most important keywords among the text is good.

It bugs me doing this, since it goes against any rule of proper writing, but it seems to help.

How much time has the website been up?

 

[gangst]

Besides what you already mentioned, I heard that using key words in the text of your site is good.

For example, my website is about photography, and I write like this: "The 105mm VR AF-S lens is bla bla bla, the 105 mm VR AF-S also has bla bla bla.
, another good thing of the 105mm VR AF-S is bla bla bla. The second and third time I could have used "this lens" instead of putting the whole name again, but apparently, repeating the most important keywords among the text is good.

It bugs me doing this, since it goes against any rule of proper writing, but it seems to help.

How much time has the website been up?

Thanks, I totally agree with you about that being annoying too.

The website has been up for about 3 months as it has been overhauled and undated.

I have been given the job of improving on what the web developer did and to be honest I am unimpressed. As the person didn't title pages, use metadata etc.

 

[OutThere]

Google provides some tools for web developers to help get their site properly indexed...sitemap files and tools for helping google find and manage your site.

If you have a google account you can go to "Webmaster Tools" under the My Account page.

 

[66217]

He/She certainly did a bad work in making the page easy for future edits, tho the looks and design are nice. Editing that site would be a pain.

I'm not completely sure if this affects the SEO, but having a clean code might improve this further since search engines would be able to read your page more easily.

One thing I noticed is that the upper-right menu isn't working correctly. The names appear above the image.

 

[redwarrior]

You can submit your site to all of the search engines, but I'm not sure how much this actually helps.

Also, be sure that all the keywords used in the meta data are also embedded in the text on the pages.

For our company, I did searches on several of the keywords that we wanted to be listed for, found one particular site that always showed up at the top, contacted them, and got links to our site put on their page. It really drove up our hits.

SEO is a complicated and time-consuming task. Have fun with that.

 

[angelwatt]

SEO techniques

• Uses meta tags: keywords and description.
• Use semantic HTML: proper use of heading tags (h1 then h2 etc.), paragraphs, lists, tables, etc. Google treats headings different than paragraph text, but also don't try to use heading to cram a lot of text in. Google is smarter than that.
• You need incoming as well as out going link traffic. The more often a search engine spider comes to your site from a different web site it increases your chances of showing up in search results.
• Make sure content is not trapped in images or Flash files. Look at your pages with style sheets and images turned off. This will give you a decent idea of how a search engine sees your page.
• Do what you can do make sure pages validate. Search engines can get caught up on bad code and will stop indexing the page, so make sure they don't have a reason to leave.
• Table layouts are somewhat harder for search engines to index than pure CSS/(X)HTML designed pages.

The big points here to focus on are inbound links and meta tags. The home page at least looked to have decent semantic HTML, though suffers from divitis a little, though that doesn't really hurt search rankings.

 

[gangst]

Thanks for the replies.

At least I know where to start working, and it seems like it is time-consuming work!

 

[jsm4182]

Make sure content is trapped in images or Flash files. Look at your pages with style sheets and images turned off. This will give you a decent idea of how a search engine sees your page.

I think you mean make sure content isn't trapped in images and Flash files.

Another thing you should do is put the css in an external stylesheet. At a certain point, search engine crawlers will stop scanning through a page, so the less amount of code being taken up by css and javascript means the more content it will scan.