Search engine optimisation

Introduction

Getting your website into the top rankings on Google (or any other search engine these days) depends more on who links to your site than what keywords are in the pages you put online.

How do search engines work?

Google's website indexing algorithm in common with many of the other big engines, increases the weighting to your site's pages the number of people linking to your site increases. The search engines work this out using automated browsing programs called spiders which roam across the web following links and reading the contents of web pages to find keywords.

For a given page to come to the top of the results list, it will almost certainly require that your site has at least one link from someone else's website AND the right keywords in the page itself. It's even better if the site or sites that link to you are ones with a large amount of traffic such as news or media sites.

The importance of keywords

Most search engine spiders look for keywords in context as the primary means of scoring pages which means words included general text on your website. This means that well written copy that incorporates keywords specific to your site is vital. It is no good simply using the word 'photography' as this is far too common to be relevant as a keyword.

In addition to this, pages that include keywords in the 'alt' attribute of images and in the 'title' attribute of anchor tags are also likely to score higher. Which reflects a general trend towards giving preference to HTML based websites that meet the W3C validation tests.

Choosing the right keywords

The next thing to do is make sure that your page's keywords aren't too common - if they are, you'll find it very hard to get to the top of a very competitive list and in some cases, such as Google, repetitions of keywords can contribute to give you a worse ranking because they are treated as SPAM.

Domain name keywords

If you're at the point of thinking of a name for your site, it's often worth choosing a name and particularly a domain name that includes keywords you want to be linked with. An example might be londonphotos.com or dakotaimages.com. If your website already exists, consider buying a new domain name and using it in tandem with your current domain.

Encouraging reciprocal links

One of the best and fastest ways to improve your search engine rankings is to get other websites to link back to yours. You can do this by creating separate sites, sending press releases to media agencies and magazines and by posting to blogs. Beware though that you should avoid engaging in spamming other sites as this can actually have a negative effect on your rankings

Website design optimisation

In a default installation, Pixaria's gallery and library web pages are not easily indexed by search engines. This is because of the way that PHP works and how search engine spiders choose which links to index and scan for keywords. Fortunately, there is a solution but it requires a bit of technical knowledge to implement. You can optimise the links throughout your Pixaria website for search engines by using the mod_rewrite feature to make the URLs of pages on your site accessible to search engines.

Another good way to improve your site rankings is to create site map and FAQ pages that incorporate links to the main pages of your website using keywords as the links. This is simple to do but can have a big effect on how the search engines see your site.

You can take this one step further by creating an XML sitemap file and submitting this to search engines so they can get a better picture of your site. More information about sitemap files is available from Google.

Accessibility and HTML standards compliance

One of the least known tips for optimising your website is to make sure it is compliant with web standards. This means using correct, valid HTML and CSS and aiming for accessibility in line with W3C recommendations. Pixaria itself is moving towards full (X)HTML and CSS compliance by version 2.0 but if you have custom themes, you should consider checking them now using the online validation service at http://validator.w3.org/.

The key points to consider include using 'alt' and 'title' attributes for images and links and ensuring that your HTML markup isn't invalid as this can cause search engines to completely ignore it.

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Created: Tuesday, August 1, 2006
Last edited: Monday, September 18, 2006