This is the second part of a series of posts on how to audit your own site to evaluate its effectiveness and usability. In the first article we looked at how your site should present information to users. In this article we look at some basics on optimising your website for search engines. Use this article as a checklist for your own site. This is by no means an exhaustive list.
Page titles
You should ensure that your page title contains specific keywords that describe the content on the page. The page title is used by search engines to describe your site. It’s what the user sees in search results and is probably the main factor determining whether the user clicks the link to your site or not.
So, for instance, check your own site’s home page title and compare it to the title of this site’s homepage:
You can see that the page title is what appears in the search results. It’s key information for users and for search engines.
Page titles that use generic terms like ‘Home’ are wasted in terms of search engine optimisation and contain little information for the user.
Headings
In the first part of this post we looked at how to present information to the user. Just using headings to break up the text on the page helps the user to find the information they need.
Headings also help search engine know what’s important on the page. They assign more value to words in headings than in standard body text so ensure that your page headings contain keywords.
Optimised URLs
The phrase ‘optimised URL’ might sound like gibberish but it actually refers to something very simple. A URL is your site’s address, e.g. freshfishdesign.co.uk. Search engines use information in URLs to assess the importance of pages. Your website should contain important keywords in its URLs just as it should in page titles and heading tags.
For example, the URL of this page is ‘freshfishdesign.co.uk/is-your-website-optimised-for-search-engines’. People searching for terms like ‘optimise website for search engines’ are far more likely to find this page than if its URL was ‘freshfishdesign.co.uk/page213.html’. (And if you use Google Analytics you’ll be able to measure what people have searched on when they find your site).
The URLs on your website should be meaningful both to search engines and to your users.
Keywords
Keywords are the words or phrases that users might search for to get to your site. For instance, if you are a garage in Thanet then you should say that on your site. That’s pretty obvious.
What you also need to remember are the less common and more specific terms that people might search for. People don’t always search for ‘garage Thanet’. They might specifically look for ‘MOT Thanet’ or ‘new tyres Thanet’. It’s important that your site contains information on all the services you offer so that people can find specific information.
Ideally, your site will have a page of content devoted to each of your services or products to ensure that people can find exactly what they need. Approximately 70% of traffic to your website will come from this kind of specific search.
Search engine submission
In Thanet, and in other parts of the world too, there are a number of local web design companies who offer to submit your site to search engines. At best, they’re so far behind the times that they don’t realise this hasn’t been necessary for nearly 10 years; at worst, they’re kidding you that they’re offering you a valuable service.
If you see a web design company offering to submit your site to Google, then you need to ask some serious questions about their competency and reliability.
What’s good for your user is good for search engines
Hopefully this article will have pointed up how closely aligned usability and searchability are. Keeping your content clear, relevant and well laid out is helpful for your user and for search engines. If you think that your site is lacking in any of the areas above, go back to your developers and ask why.
We’ll look at the quality of information provided by web design companies in a later post.
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