2.05 Optimising your content

Most optimisation is just common sense, particularly once you realise that the best approach is to provide your users what they want.

Serve your clients first.
Before worrying about any of the optimisation approaches on this page be sure that the content on your site provides your clients with the information they are after in a clear and understandable way. Don't compromise this by worrying about word counts or keyword densities.

Why optimimise?
The aim of optimisation is to make it easier for your clients, potential or existing, to find your web site in the major search engines. Over three quarters of visitors making a first visit to your web sites will come through a search engine so optimisation for them is logical. Less obviously, a large proportion of repeat visits will probably arrive the same way. The search engines have become so well integrated into the way people move around the internet that they are much more likely to type your web address into a search engine than into the address bar of their browser.

How to optimise
Optimisation is done page by page. For each page you need to decide on a range of specific search terms that your visitors are likely to use when looking for your web site.

Selecting search terms
This is, initially, largely intuitive. Put yourself in the place of your clients and consider what search terms you would use if you were in need of the information on this particular page. Once you have some options there are some useful web sites – www.wordtracker.com for instance - where you can compare the wordlist you have created with terms that people are actually searching for online. These are less useful for a practice web site, serving a relatively small geographical area, than they are for web sites with a more universal target audience.

Keywords and key phrases
There is no point in optimising your site for single keywords like vet or veterinary. There is too much competition worldwide from other sites using the same words. You can optimise single words in your practice name and address if they are out of the ordinary, otherwise most of your optimisation will be based on keyphrases. These are simply pairs or groups of words that people expect to see together on your pages. You can optimise each page for sets of keywords - “puppy party”, “puppy training”, young dog” etc

One topic per page
Each page should, in general, be about a single topic or group of closely related themes. Apart from usability issues this makes it much easier to optimise the page for a particular set of keywords and key phrases

Home page first
Your home page is the most important page to get right. It shouldn't be a splash page – that's a page with some eye candy but no content. It should be a focal point for all the content on your site and contain navigation links to take visitors where they want to go as efficiently as possible.

Titles and headings
Be sure to include your main key phrases for each page in the title of that page – that's the text that appears right at the top of your browser window when you view the page – and in headings – text presented in bold or in a larger size towards the top of the page. The search engines consider title and heading text important.

Repeat yourself
Use your keyphrases more than once – but not to excess – about six times seems a generally accepted limit. Don't compromise the readability of the page for the sake of getting them in one more time.

How much text?
Make sure that you cover each topic in appropriate breadth. Brevity is, admittedly, a virtue online but you can go too far. A loose guideline is to provide at least two hundred words or so. That's enough for you to include a functional spread of keywords and phrases.

Meta tags
Meta tags are hidden blocks of text – only visible to the search engines. They were abused by people spamming the search engines early in the webs short history and are now mostly ignored. It is still worth including them, particularly directory tags, but they must be tailored for each page specifically and should only include words that appear in visible text that page.

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