Your target audience is someone who is already looking for you! Whether that is your company, products, services or for the information you have on your website. As search engines are becoming increasingly popular (over 80% of users end up at a site due to a search engine, according to the Forrester Research Study) it is more important than ever that your target audience can find you when they are looking.
So how do you make sure they can find you? I have put together some key search engine optimisation techniques to help you boost your websites visibility on search engines.

Title Tags

Title tags are probably one of the most important parts of your site for keyword usage. You should have unique page title tags for every page of your site and use the most appropriate keywords.

Meta Tags

When it comes to meta tags, the most important one for search engines is the meta description. This will be used by most search engines as your description in the search results pages. So it’s important to include your keyword phrases for the specific page here.

Keyword optimised content

If you want your site to rank well for certain keywords and phrases you have to make sure you’re using them in your site! Otherwise your site won’t look relevant to your keyword phrases and won’t rank well. Use your keywords in your text and link from other pages of your site with the right anchor text.

Back-end things to think about

• Do you have a robots.txt file set up to disallow search engine spider access to parts of the site that you don’t want indexed, or that can’t be indexed?
• Do you have an HTML and XML sitemap to help the search engine spiders find all the pages of your site?
• Is the content management system (CMS) or e-commerce system you are using creating search engine friendly URLs?

A lot of this will depend on the way your site is built. However it’s built make sure that it is search engine friendly and take the time to get your robots.txt and sitemaps created properly.

Links

If you are going to get good rankings, it is really important that you have relevant links from other sites. There are loads of different strategies to doing this and this is going to be the bulk of your ongoing SEO work. Getting the right sort of links to your site shows search engines that other people think your site is worth linking to, it shows it’s them that your site is popular and this really helps your search engine listings.

Now you know what to do, what are you waiting for? Take some time to implement some of these ideas and you should start to see an improvement in search engine listing and traffic to your website. Don’t make it difficult for your target audience to find you, increase your visibility now!

Gemma