How to begin optimising your site - Part 1

You've got a website for your company or your hobby but you want to get the most out of it. How do you begin, what are the basics you need to address first. Well, the first one's a no brainer, you need to know how well your site is doing, how many hits its getting and whether or not your users are finding the site useful. For this you need to install Google analytics, free tracking software which will tell you how many people visit your site and how they're finding your site. To install analytics you will need access to the html code of your site, which means you will need ftp access to your server. Google explains how to do it.

Once analytics is set up you will be able to see how your site is doing, if you look at your traffic sources you will see where your traffic is coming from. If you are getting any traffic from search engines you will be able to view which keywords your site is being found for. Keywords are what people type in to google when searching for something. You need to think of which keywords you would like your site to be found for. Then you need to examine the keywords and check how many other people are already otpimising for them. Too much competition and it may not be possible to get a page one position on a search engine. You then also need to check that there is a decent enough volume of monthly searches carried out to make them worthwhile. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your site.

Once you've figured out what you need to be ranking in search engines for its time to optimise your site to get those rankings. There are a multitude of factors that need to be present on and off your site. There are what's called on page and off page factors involved. On page seo factors includes the actual content of your site and how your site is put together. Off page factors involves getting other sites to link to yours. Google counts links from one site to another as votes. You need as many votes from the right kind of sites.

Some of the basic things you need to address on your site are as follows. Build a text heavy site with a strong navigational structure that validates to the www.w3c.orgs html standards. In other words, build a well made site with lots of text content that your visitors will find interesting, useful, funny, whatever. Avoid building the entire site out of flash and use text and not images for your navigation buttons. Also, avoid using javascript in the navigation. If you do these things at the least then search engines crawlers will be able to access your page easily enough and find your content. Thats half of the battle, once you're pages are indexed by the search engines they will start to accrue trust with them the more time passes. Then you're ready to begin building links, but thats another part 2.