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February 2009

Search Engine Optimisation by numbers...

There are a huge number of factors we need to take into account when Search Engine Optimising a site; but there are some simple ones that you can count on.

Firstly, the amount of content on a page. If you haven't got enough content, how can you expect Google to rate you as the most appropriate page to serve to somebody searching for content? A rule of thumb is to have at least 200 words on key pages that you want to attract search engines to.

Possibly more importantly, do you have appropriate meta TITLE tag content? You're looking to get your keywords across in a maximum of 65 characters, ideally towards the beginning of any supporting text, e.g. "Website design from WebSanity", not "WebSanity website design". (Don't forget you'll be committing a dreadful mistake if you use the same title tags on more than one page!)

The meta DESCRIPTION tag. Not so important, but this text can show up in your "search engine results snippets", so keep it below 200 characters.

Keywords. Hardly important at all these days (apart from when optimising Google AdWords campaigns!), but keep below 20 phrases. Oh, and don't put spaces after the ,s and keep them all lower case. So, "website design,search engine optimisation", not "Website Design, Search Engine Optimisation".

There are many more numbers we could mention, but these give you a flavour of some of the complexities of professional Search Engine Optimisation, which we hope you might find useful.