Search engines can provide the life blood for many websites, they deliver users - potential customers – to key areas of your site. It is therefore imperative for websites to interact with the search engines in the best manner possible. The nature of this relationship is sometimes confusing, sometimes fraught, but is almost always conducted behind-the-scenes. This article will look into the need to adequately optimise your site for search engines while detailing some simple tips to keep the traffic flowing!
Search Engine Optimisation has wide-ranging implications for almost every area of a businesses online presence. The consequences of not considering a search engine optimised site can be serious, the traffic delivered to your site can be drastically reduced by making some apparently innocuous design decisions.
Any member of staff taking decisions about content managements systems or technologies to be deployed on the company website must be aware of the implications and requirements of search engine optimisation. Optimising the site for search engine collaboration is much easier to do while the site is being created.
One area often untapped by normal search engine optimisation is the relatively new field of image search. Many popular search engines, such as Google, allow the user to enter search terms and have them supply images related to those terms. For the website owner this can be another potential vector to gain increased traffic onto their site – it’s a further use of existing resources that can be enabled at relatively little additional expense. Even some small steps can result in increased traffic from image searching websites. Steps such as changing filenames to something relevant to the image can allow the search engines to index the images content. If the original filename (on many occasions something like IMG0123.jpg or mainimage.jpg) is used then the search engine will struggle to evaluate the image for relevancy. Further more ‘alt text’ should also be set to reflect the images content.
Search engine optimisation, or
SEO, can dramatically increase the traffic delivered to your site. It’s an essential element to any
website design, and in this increasingly online world it is imperative for your business to be easily accessible.
As the phrase goes – ‘content is king’. However, if you are struggling to drive enough traffic to your site then some of the best content in the world can be going to waste. Making your site accessible to search engines may seem like a massive task but with some training and planning that content can be easily accessed by the world.
