A business or organisation is unlikely to attract new business via its website unless potential customers can find it .... and this means striving to ensure the site is listed high in the major search engines.  This requires search engine optimisation (SEO), which involves much more than submitting your site to the search engines and sitting back to watch it climb the ranks.

Sure, you want a website that looks good, and is a positive experience for your visitors.  But search engine robots that visit your site don't spend time looking at the scenery and admiring the flash animations.  No, all they are interested in is words and we can help them in their quest by feeding their appetite during the site design process ....

So what would be the ideal diet for them to achieve good search engine optimisation?

Starters - Meta tags

In the coding of any web page, optional descriptions can be placed at the beginning.  These are known as meta tags.  The human visitor normally never sees them but try clicking View | Source from your browser's menu or right click on a web page to reveal a pop-up menu which will show something similar.  Now you can see the feast of words in all their glory.  Look for entries near the top such as:

meta name="Description" content=""
meta name="Keywords" content=""
<title>A descriptive name for this site</title>

Why not try it for our page that you are viewing now?

Within the quotes will be words or phrases that provide vital information that the search engines will use to catalogue your site.  It is vital that these are well thought out.  Try looking at the meta tags of your competitors who already appear near the top of the search engine rankings.  This will provide an excellent base from which to work on your own.

Main Course - Keyphrase-rich Content

The opening paragraph of your site should include focused key phrases that address these specific areas:-

• Product / Service description
• Product Service benefits
• Region of operation

Desert

These search engines are 'grazers'.  They love to jump from tidbit to tidbit.  And what better way to help them along their way around your site than easy to follow hyperlinks and navigation.  In fact, why not offer them a Site Map so they can over-indulge?  Google has a particular penchant for a special kind of Site Map - we can arrange for this to be on the menu if you wish!

After Dinner Speeches

Once you have your new website you'll want to tell everybody about it.  What better way than to list it in hundreds of free directories on the Internet.  We highly recommend SliQ Submitter, an affordable, automatic directory submission tool - easily build links and boost your site's performance in search engine results.