Last updated on May 3rd, 2024 at 08:33 pm

Over the past 10 years the author has talked to many people who want their site to be optimised for search engines (SEO’d) but do not have the budget to pay for the work to be done – rather than be ripped off by companies who promise you top positions in search engines we have decided to provide some very basic tips for people who want to do the work themselves.

Following these tops will not guarantee you top place but will go a long way to improving your ranking in the major search engines.

1. Think about what you want to be found for – think phrases and not single words and if possible think about your location, many people want to find local suppliers if possible.  Think of no more than two phrases for each page.
2. Make sure that the phrases appear on the page, you may know that the page is about your wonderful oven cleaning service but unless you say this on the page how will the search engines know?
3. Make sure that the phrases appear in the page title (the bit between <title> and </title> in the code of the page).  This is possibly the most important part of “on-page” SEO that you can do.  The title is the bit that appears on the very top of the browser window (in the blue bar on Windows Internet Explorer).  Titles should be no more than 63 characters long but the phrases can be separated by colons, hyphens, commas or vertical bars.  It is not a good idea to put your company name first in the title, add it to the end for branding by all means but put your phrases at the front.
4. Use the meta description to include the phrase – this is located in the header section of the code on your page and typically looks like <meta name=”description” content=”xxxxxxx”> (it may end with a /> depending on the version of html you are using).  The description is the bit in the content=”xxxxxx” and should be a properly formed sentence as this is sometimes (but not always) the bit that is displayed by the search engines so is also one of the elements that will attract people to click on your listing in the search engine results)
5. Do not worry about the keywords meta tag – despite what you may read, the major engines do not use them – Google for example is on record as saying that they ignore them.  About 6 years ago they were an important part of a website but were so easliy manipulated that the engines started to disregard them.
6. Put your main phrase into the h1 (main header) on the page.  If you do not like the default look of the main header you can always change this by using a style in a CSS style sheet.
7. Repeat the main phrase a few times through-out the page – a good rule of thumb is to use the old idea of presentations, “tell the visitor what you are going to tell them, tell the visitor and then tell the visitor what you told them”, in other words use the main phrase in the introduction, then in the main content and then in the summary.
8. Make sure that there are links to other pages in your site, and if possible include a link to an html sitemap (see our “do I need a sitemap” page for more details).  It is important that both the human visitor and the search engine spiders can find their way around your site easily.
9. Do NOT hide text on your page either by making so small that it cannot be read or by making it the same colour as the page background.  The search engines are very clear that this is frowned upon.
10. Read the Google webmaster guidelines and make sure that your site complies with them
11. Get some links from good quality sites that are in a similar market area as you or talk about similar subjects – this can take some time but think laterally – if you are selling raincoats think about links from weather sites, wellingtonboot sellers etc.
12. Keep your site up to date and add new content on a regular basis – when you write new articles or pages think if you can link back to existing pages (in the way that we linked to some of our articles above)
13. Sign up for the various webmaster tools and take a look at any problems found by the search engines.
14. If you can, keep an eye on your website logfile to make sure that the search engines are visiting the site.

You should bear in mind that the whole process of SEO can take weeks if not months to produce good results, don’t give up – but by the same token do not make changes too often to a page – remember that the crawlers have to visit the page, the engines have to analyse the page, update their results and publish the updated database and this can take some time.

Of course, there are other thing you can do and even the list above can take up a lot of your time that  you may prefer to spend developing your business – if this is the case then you may want to get professionals in to work on your site for you – we are more than willing to help small and medium businesses in the UK with their SEO , just contact us for more details.