Speckled Frog

Web guide

How can I get better results in the search engines?

Choose your keywords

This should be done BEFORE you write your site content and in some cases before the site is designed. Your keywords are the words that people will use to find your product or service. A recruitment company may write about it’s latest ‘opportunities’, but a potential client will look for ‘jobs’. Your keywords and phrases should be at least two or more words long as this is what a user might enter.

Put your keywords into your site

Your keywords should appear in the crucial locations on your web pages. The page title, the headline and the first paragraphs of your web page.

Make your site accessible

Making an accessible site removes any unnecessary code (used just for layout or design) from the page, which means the important keywords are nearer the top of the page and in higher density.

Make content count

When you write the content for your site, make sure you include your chosen keywords. Avoid marketing ‘blurb’ which real people won’t use when searching for you and stick to clear, concise information. Make sure your site content is fresh as this will encourage search engines to re-index (and re-rank).

Use Meta tags

Meta Tags are hidden information that can only be seen by looking at the site code (essentially by search engine robots). Although they are not the magic answer to getting good rankings (Google usually ignores them), they can improve rankings with many search engines. They also add another ‘layer’ of keywords on top of site content that can make a site more findable.

Links that make sense

When adding links in your site, make the descriptions useful. Rather than saying ‘For a list of our latest jobs click here; link the keywords instead ‘See the latest jobs in Biotech’.

Submit key pages

Submit two or three pages that best summarise your web site. This gives the search engine alternative pages to begin crawling your site from if it has difficulty reaching one of the pages.

Check and change

Check where your site appears every couple of months as well as checking your site visitor statistics. If you are still not coming up in the first two or three pages the try changing your copy or adding some new articles.