So you’re designing your first website and you have heard somebody mention SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Essentially SEO relates to how your site ranks within search engines. You need to think about this from the moment you buy your domain registration. For example if your website was about "discount laptops", you should try and call it discountlaptops.com or something similar. If someone were to search discount laptops in their search engine, how likely would they be to find your site? Would it stand proudly at the top of the list inviting users in, or down in the 7th page dungeon where nobody has the energy to go. With search engines providing so much traffic, between 50% and 90% for the majority of sites, SEO is extremely significant.

The first thing that you can do to help your site be search engine friendly is use keywords. You should choose a set of keywords that you feel will find users help your site. To use the earlier example, they might be; laptop, discount, cheap and computer. However as you can probably imagine, there will be lots of websites looking for attention when people search these terms. Therefore you need to research your market and be creative in choosing your keywords to be competitive. Search for keyword suggestion tools available free on the internet for inspiration. Once you have chosen keywords, try to make these keywords or phrases appear as often as possible in the content of your website without making every other word a keyword. They should also appear in the titles of different articles, pages or sections of your site, and as often as possible, in your domain name.

Secondly, search engines love backlinks. Backlinks are simply a link to your website posted somewhere else on the internet. For example, when you comment on a blog that you follow and use your URL as a signature, you have a backlink. These backlinks help your website appear more popular to search engines as they see the website being mentioned in numerous locations. Don’t rely on your own backlinks! Search engines also examine the links embedded in images and buttons. So don’t be afraid to make clickable banners and signatures that your users can use to promote your site when they are using forums and making comments.

The content of your site is also extremely important in SEO. You should be thinking about this from day one! Most importantly your content must be unique. Copying generic articles from other sites and sharing endless copies of news won’t do your website any favours when trying to rank highly with search engines. As mentioned before try and use your keywords in the majority of your content without making it obvious to the user you are dropping your keywords in at every possible opportunity. Users want good content to make use of, not be bombarded with keywords! You should update your site as often as possible, as this attracts search engine ‘spiders’ to your site to check on all the good work you’ve been doing.

Overall SEO is of massive importance in modern web design. Bringing people to your site requires a good search engine ranking which can only be achieved through good SEO and increasing traffic. The few simple strategies mentioned here will help your search engine ranking. The further you delve into SEO the more techniques you will learn which can only help you further!

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