As the internet has grown in importance it's become more and more important to make sure that your website performs to match you expectations. Ever more people are turning to the internet to find what they are looking for, whether its holidays or white goods, books or even a date
So it is important to understand what the Search Engines requirements are. Google of course is the dominant Search Engine in the UK and close attention has to be paid to its requirements.
Over time Google has gotten a lot slicker at detecting artificial text so it is vital to ensure that you write good solid copy that is not spam key word stuffed with your target phrases. Google can detect the reading level of your documents and the standard of grammar and spelling, so all these need to be right before you publish content.
Don't copy
At one time there was a whole area of the internet dedicated to circulating around the same content, it worked wonderfully and you could leverage your traffic hugely by having hundreds of sites hosting the same content. Additionally lazy webmasters would cut and paste content from the usual places, Wikipedia etc. Those days have gone. Now any duplicate copy, even small snippets can end up causing you a problem.
So it is vital to write well and professional content, check it with a tool like copyscape before publishing and additionally patrol your site regularly to ensure no content is being republished elsewhere without your permission.
Remove pages that are "thin” or lightweight in content Google loves rich and informative pages and pushes down sites that have too much thin content.
Google uses urls and the text within them in a number of ways, firstly keywords on a page url can help to determine what a page is about and also the url appears in search query so it influences the decision a visitors makes about which url to click, so it's a double win.
Ethnically SEO friendly urls are easier to handle so always select them if you have that option.
Good navigation
An easy to use navigation is helpful, and ensuring that all pages are linked from others, that way a Search Engine Spider can discover your site naturally.
This is less important these days, but the larger your site, and we talking here of 10,000's of pages or 100,000's of pages then having a Google Sitemap is increasingly of value.
It's more important than ever before to make sure you website is as friendly as it can be, the more the Search Engines like what they find the better your websites can be expected to perform.
Adrian Lawrence is a webmaster with Discount Domains one of the top UK ICANN registrars© 2022 Discount Domains UK (a brand of Astutium Ltd)
