A common problem for many people in the busy modern world is finding the time and effort to optimise their websites however there are so very easy and quick effective ways to optimise your website with minimal effort. Below we are going to explore some of these methods.

1. Change your title tags:

A little while ago we did a post on the importance of the title tag and it may come as no shock that when trying to optimise your website this is a pretty good place to start. By changing your title to match your target keywords and adding call to orders can help to boost your search engine rankings.

2. Write your links and images the right way:

A common factor many people overlook on their website the way they code their links and images.

<img src=”images/portfolio-item.jpg” /> 

A typical example of how to link to an image on their site, however this doesn’t tell the search engines much about what the image is about. This is why the alt tag is imperative.

<img src=”images/ portfolio-item.jpg” alt=”Website Development Portfolio Item - Company X” />

By adding keyword rich alt tags we can help to boost the keyword density of the webpage. This also applies when we do links:

<a href=http://www.my-website.com>My Website </a>

Again like our image it is lacking a ‘description’. To fix this all we need to do is add a little extra code:

<a href=http://www.my-website.com title=”Professional Website Templates From My Website”>My Website </a>

By rewriting links following the method above it is much easier to increase keyword density and make it easier for users to see which link goes where.

3. Make it easy to skim read your content:

It is said that many people on the internet no longer read website content but skim through it. This may be the case when you were reading this article. By bolding key points, list headings and important keywords you can quickly grab the attention of your visitors and more importantly help to increase your rankings, however like all things in SEO if used too much can be counterproductive.

4. Submit your website to the engines:

Another overlooked technique is to simply submit your website to Google, Yahoo and Msn and so on.

Google - http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Yahoo - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
MSN - http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

5. Remove any Black Hat techniques

Black hat techniques such as spamming, hiding keyword spammed text, changing page content depending on visitor or Search-Bot and so on, are very easy ways to spoil your rankings in the search engines and despite any short term benefits that may be achieved will eventually lead to long term drawbacks on your site. The best solution is to simply remove them.

Because it's our first post of 2009 instead of our usual newsletter we are giving all our readers a free one-page business/personal website template for use on their sites.

Free One Page Business Website Template By Web Sheffield by Web Sheffield is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Well you can look at the question in two different ways; firstly from the human side and secondly from the search engine side. But in both, the title tag is very very important to your website no matter how big or small it may be.

Just to recap on the title tag it appears on the top of every browser and at the bottom of your application button on explorer (if you are using Windows of course) and most importantly on your search engine listing.

From the human side the title can be used to quickly identify what is open and generally can provide a summary of the page they are looking at.

From the search engine side it is considered by many to be one of the most important factors on a site helping to achieve high traffic and rankings alike. Simply changing an old title such as “Company Name Homepage”, with a keyword rich title can help to get you noticed very quickly.

However with all aspects of your site you have to take care on a few things.

Simply filling your title tag with all the keywords related to your business/site is not a good idea though, it’s ugly and makes it very hard for users to see what your site is about. So we’ve put together a few tips for when you’re coming up with your title tags:

1. Make it unique to the page – simply picking the same title tag (and meta tags are also included in this) and reusing it over many pages will in fact do more damage than good to your search engine listings. The major search engines reward uniqueness and punish duplicate data therefore your pages are more likely to achieve higher rankings with unique titles that are relevant to the page.


2. Keep it under 80 characters – many search engines will only count the first 80 characters of your title tags so why take the risk of missing key words. Keeping it under 80 characters will keep you from long keyword spammed tags.


3. Keep your name last– unless you have keywords in your name (or are trying to promote your brand name) then your name is simply taking up key space. Get what you want to say on the tag first then your name, not the other way around.


4. Call to order – using call to orders in your title tag is excellent way to let your visitors what they’re letting themselves in for on your site. For example “Buy Authentic Italian Full Cream Vanilla Ice Cream For £9.97 From Company Name” Our user can see exactly what they’re looking for as well as having related keywords that are vital for the search engines.

So remember, make your title unique and relevant to your pages and you won’t go far wrong. For more information on this post please email us