If you have a website, you must optimise it for search engines or you’re simply wasting money on hosting fees. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is what gets your website on page one of Google. The difference this makes to your traffic is incalculable. Companies spend thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars a year on consultancy fees or in-house expertise to keep their website on top. 

They’re willing to spend these vast sums because SEO can sound like a dark art. But, in reality, getting the basics right can be blindingly obvious. It’s a balance of engineering a website so that Google, Yahoo! and the like can understand how best to index it, without affecting its usability for real people. With a little guidance, even the most computer-illiterate person can have a stab at getting on the Google front page. 

1 Getting Started

Start with a clear idea of what your user is going to do on your website. 

Are they visiting because they want to buy something from you right there and then? Are you showcasing a particular speciality of your business? Are do they just to find contact details? Different users will take different journeys, so structure your site to get them to their goal as efficiently as possible. You need a logical structure reflected in a clear navigation.

Taking this to the extreme, if you are a commercial printer introducing a web-to-print service, you might launch a whole new site so rather than try to cater for two different audiences looking for different outcomes in a single site, you can divide the two and maximise the SEO capability. 

Even within a separate website there will be multiple audiences. For your web-to-print shop, there will be users who land on your homepage and are immediately interested in a special offer, but there will also be users who don’t and need guidance to find the right product. Good navigation with a clear hierarchical classification of categories and sub-categories is a must. 

2 Word perfect

A sensible, logical site structure means that you can create really well-targeted category pages that carry a good density of relevant keywords. 

Keywords are the words on a page of your website that match the words someone types into a search engine like Google. When optimising lower-level category pages, you can be really quite specific, which lowers the competition and therefore gives you a better chance of getting on page one. If you want to be 

the top-ranking letterpress printer in Wollongong, then you need to ensure your page carries terms users will search for. In this instance, “Wollongong” and “letter-press” are fairly obvious, but if you’re stuck for ideas then there are plenty of free tools on the web to give you a few prompts, not least of which is Google’s Keyword tool. 

The pages need to be optimised too, both in terms of the content and HTML structure and properties. Search engines pay a great deal of heed to hierarchies in web pages. Page title and page description are the most important elements in how search engines understand how to index a page. Use them sensibly: for example, the page title is a 68-character text string so don’t paste War and Peace here.

The content visible to your reader is equally important for SEO. You should use meta data, such as tags for headlines and titles, to show search engines that these elements are more important than the paragraph text that follows, while ensuring the text includes those keywords.

However, be careful not to overdo things. Ultimately you want people on your site more than search engines, so your copy should remain engaging – avoid ‘keyword  stuffing’.

The URLs for each page can also be optimised: myprint.com/wideformat/banners/vinyl&productid=123456 is much better than myprint.com/id=654321.

3 Points of Difference

If you’re selling products online, you might have lots of very similar pages with only small changes – business cards on different stocks, or photobooks with similar templates. 

To a search engine, this might look like a lot of pages of duplicate content and you can be penalised for duplication. One way round this is to use canonical URLs, as above, which is to standardise your URLs on a format so that a search engine can ignore variations as they all refer to the ‘master’ URL. 

There is plenty you can do outside your site to make search engines see it as worth visiting. For a start, register with them. Google, Bing and Yahoo! may be the first port of call, but in some countries different search engines rule – Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia. Also register your site with directories such as Dmoz.

Getting other relevant sites to link to yours will raise your profile with search engines and may help your search rank, but avoid ‘link exchanges’. Search engines are pretty wise to reciprocal links. Over time, you will accrue plenty of links, so it’s worth looking up a backlink checker (there are plenty of free backlink tools on the web) to see who’s linking to you.

Finally, measure how traffic is going. Google has a system called PageRank that indicates the overall importance of your site in the wider ‘webosphere’. Much more useful is the free Google Analytics service to analyse traffic. It’s pretty straightforward to sign up for an account and all you need to do is add a small piece of code to your web pages.

It’s essential to continually review your progress. Perhaps your registration form is too complicated. Perhaps you’ve placed your shopping basket where no one can find it. You’ll never know unless you track what users do on the site, how they got there, how often they visit, how long they spend on it, where they leave it and when, if ever, they come back.

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