Most people when using search engine to find a site of product will only go to sites which appear on the first one or two pages returned by the search engine. It is, therefore vitally important that your site is at the top of the ranking for every search engine. There are various factors involved in achieving a good search engine presence. This document will explain some of the ways in which you can improve your sites ranking.

Once your site is optimised we will use our dedicated Search Engine Submission Server to submit your domain to over 10,000 different search engines every month.

When optimising your web site for a good ranking, you should consider the following factors.

Domain Name

One of the best ways to improve your search engine ranking is to include the most popular search words in your site name, more commonly known as your domain name. For example, if you are a letting agent in Salisbury, registering the domain name salisburylettingagent.co.uk would result in higher ranking than say fredsmithltd.co.uk.

For example, if you are a letting agent in Salisbury, registering the domain name salisburylettingagent.co.uk would be a good idea.

Page Titles

When the search engines are scanning your site, they do not just see the homepage. They look at all the pages of your site for content.

Knowing this, it is a good idea to configure each of the different pages of your website with individual, keyword rich page titles.

For example, Using the Salisbury letting agent example once more if the website had 4 pages:

• Home Page
• Property to Let
• Let Your Property
• Company Information

It would be wise to title each of the pages as the below example:

PAGE NAME	PAGE TITLE
Home Page	Welcome to Company Name. Letting Agent in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK. property to let
Property to Let	Company Name - Property to let, find rental property in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK.
Let Your Property	Company Name – Let your Property, rent out your property, Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK
Company Information	Company Name – letting agent specialising in rental and property management, Salisbury, UK

As you can see, each page name has been configured with a separate, keyword rich page title.

Keyword Rich Text:

The search engines also use the text that is displayed on each page when indexing the site. Therefore it is wise to have a keyword rich paragraph or two, on each page of your website.

A good example of this is:

www.york.castle-estates.co.uk

Each page on the site contains keyword rich text, with most keywords and phrases repeated up to 4 times on each page. But don’t over-do it, and don’t deliberately hide text. If Google thinks the page looks dodgy, it will penalise it, or even ban it completely.

The York branch of Castle Estates search engine presence at the time of writing is very good, they are on the 1st page of Google for multiple searches detailed below:

Letting agent York - 3rd
York Lettings - 1st
Lettings York - 1st
York Property Letting - 4th

Meta Tag: (keywords)

Years ago, keywords were the main part of the site that search engines looked at when indexing the site. Unfortunately this was completely open, and the not so honest webmasters would use unrelated non-applicable keywords, in a bid to drive more users to the website.

Search engines quickly picked up on this, and moved the meta-keywords to the bottom of the list of factors used when indexing sites. Some actually went a step further and completely ignored them.

We tend to still use them, but we place very little importance on these.

Inbound Links:

An Inbound Like is where another site has a link to your site. So, for example, if a Salisbury Community Directory site had a link which the user could click on to go to a Salisbury Letting Agent site, that would count as one link. The more inbound links the better your search engine ranking will be.

Taking Google as an example, Google works as a democracy – each inbound link is counted as 1 “vote” for your site, the more “votes” the more popular your site is.

The “voting” system is an excellent way of ranking sites, as sites only tend to link to other valid sites.

The best ways of getting as many links as possible are below:

1. Approach any companies you have a business relationship with and ask them to place a link from their site to yours.
2. Do a Google search for “business directorys” in your area, there are lots of these type of sites and most will give you a link free of charge.
3. Advertise. There are lots of “paid for” and free directory sites, which will place a link to your site in a relevant section of their directory.
4. Use social sites like Twitter to interact with your customers.
5. Avoid 'link farms'.

Some companies who you approach, may ask you to set up a link to them. These reciprocal links offer a benefit to both sites as you are in effect “voting” for each other.

If your own site does not contain a “links” page, we will be happy to add one for you. You will be able to control the content, and the links on this page yourself.

HTML Validation

A badly structured page will cause problems when search engines examine your website. Using an HTML validator to check the website code will not only help the search engine and thus improve your ranking, but will also make sure your site works with all the major browsers.

Google Webmaster Tools

The biggest search engine, Google, offer a number of free tools to help you make your site more attractive to Google. These tools are offered under the general name of 'Google Webmaster Tools' which Google describe as "e; suite of webmaster tools provides you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. They can show you Google’s view of your site, help you diagnose problems, and let you share info with us to help improve your site’s visibility."e;

You can find out more about the tools, including how to download and install them by going to

www.google.com/webmasters/

Google Tool Bar

Another Google product we recommend is the Google Toolbar. This piece of software has many features: pop up blocker, custom buttons, search box etc.

However the 2 very useful sections of the product are the “Pagerank” which lets you know what pagerank your site has achieved, higher the better. And most importantly the “backward link” section. Where it will let you know how many sites in their index are linking to you. (IE. How many “votes” your site currently has).

The toolbar can be downloaded from the below address:

www.google.com/toolbar/ff/

Summary:

What we do for you:

1. Submit your web site to all the major search engines every month.
2. Links placed within our own portal – properywebsite.com. Increasing inbound links.
3. Continuous research into how the major search engines rank web sites, so that we can keep you abreast of the very latest changes to keep your web site at the top.

What you must do yourself:

1. Find 3rd party sites to be linked from and approach the sites asking for the links to be established.
2. Advertising of your site in local media.
3. Control any paid-for campaigns, for example Google adwords (adwords is explained in a separate document.)

Please take some time to read through this document, as addressing the points contained will go a long way in regards to getting a good search engine presence.

If you wish to improve your search engine raking, a good starting point would be to look at the different pages of your website, and create a keyword rich page title for each of the pages, including the words and phrases you expect to be found under. Look at the example above for a good illustration of keyword rich page titles.

Once you have done the page titles, you may wish to edit the text of each page on the site to include more keyword rich text, with the keywords and phrases you expect to be found under repeated approx 4/5 times per page.

After that, you may wish to search for domain names that include keywords that you expect to be found under, a good site for checking available domain names is www.ukreg.com. We are able to register and set up any domain name that you find is available on your behalf.

Alterations to page titles, page text and addition of links pages represent chargeable work and are not included in hosting fees, please contact us for a quotation.

(Created June 2008 - Updated Feb 2011)