Search engine optimisation

Getting noticed

Getting your website to feature in the first couple of pages of search engine results pages means that your link is more likely to be clicked on than if you're much further down.  To get a high ranking on the results page means that your site and its pages need to be as friendly as possible to search engines.

Being friendly to search engines

Each search engine uses a different strategy to determine how relevant a website is to a given search query.  However, there is enough commonality between them to draw some general guidelines to follow which will increase the chance of a relevant page from your site featuring in the results page.

There are, in essence, three areas to consider to raise the ranking of your pages:

• the way your website is built
• the copy on your web pages
• links from other sites to yours

Helped by the JDD

The JDD is designed to make sure that the way your website is built is optimised for search engines.

Top-quality copy

Obviously, the copy on your website should be well written and spelled correctly.

It should also contain key phrases that are relevant to the content and which would be used to construct a query by someone wanting to find that kind of page.  These key phrases however shouldn't compromise the readability of the content for visitors. 

Links to you

Lastly, links from other sites that are rated highly by search engines can significantly affect your site's ranking.  So, it pays to have your customers or clients put a link on their site to yours, if at all possible.

Other places to get links to your site are on blogs, from sites that publish white papers you've written and so on.