Search Engine Optimisation

We have put together a few things to know about promoting your web site effectively via Search Engines. While this is not a definitive guide it is a good start to help you gain higher search engine placement for your web site.

The first thing we are going to recommend is that you add the link for your property at TheWay2Stay and Villa-Bookings to your own website. This increases your listing's page rank in Google and also adds to your own by your linking to a similarly 'themed' web site - villa rental.

The best way to link is to use either the first line of the heading from the page you have here as your link text or the name of the property as the link, with the main headline as a description for the link - this increases the ranking for those keywords.

For example:
The main heading for Ta' Mananni in Malta is "Holiday Villa Rental Qala, Island of Gozo, Malta" so you could use:

Ta' Mananni- Holiday Villa Rental Qala, Island of Gozo, Malta

or

Holiday Villa Rental Qala, Island of Gozo, Malta - Ta' Mananni

We also recommend using the <strong></strong> tags for the link as these are also taken into consideration by Search Engines.

Secondly we are going to cover the HTML tags Title, Headings, Alt and Meta.

Title Tags - <title></title>

Most of the major search engines give great relevance to keywords in the title tags of the page and it is imperative that every page has a title tag. Listings that include the search term in the title and Meta description tags have a higher click-through rate (often more than double the traffic).

Some optimisers have found that short keyword rich descriptions in title tags work best however others cram in as many keywords as possible.

For example:
"Mountains.co.uk : Category page - Camping equipment, Outdoor equipment, Waterproof clothing, Mountaineering equipment"

Would be more effective as:
"Camping Equipment, Outdoor Equipment, Mountaineering Equipment, Waterproof clothing"

Additionally, it is good to practice to begin each word in your title with an initial capital letter. There is evidence that this will help since some (not all) search engines treat search criteria differently if there is an initial capital.

Heading Tags - <h1></h1>

Many of the major search engines place a lot of relevance on keywords in header tags (H1, H2 and H3 etc) and it is important to use these with relevant keywords as often as is practical.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can be used to format the size, colour, placement etc for heading tags but it is important that the actual <h*></h*> codes are used, as using a CSS class or id would not be picked up by search engines.

ALT Text

We highly recommend the inclusion of ALT text to describe the contents of an image.

Use keyword rich descriptions in the ALT text, as some search engines index the keywords. Although unproven, it may also be beneficial to use the 'title' tag for images as well.

For example:
<img src="images/view.gif" alt="View from Cyprus Villa." title="View from Cyprus Villa." />

This will also provide a text description to visitors with slow download connections or have their images turned off.

To ensure that the text is visible, it is highly important to set the image's width and height dimensions. E.g. width = "100" height = "60".

The use of ALT text also enables visually disabled visitors using screen readers, or reviewers, to interpret the image on the screen. Images can be translated, only if there is alternative text describing the image.

If using images for layout these should have blank ALT text attributed e.g. (alt="") as this also benefits the visually disabled. Also consider adding a period "." at the end of the ALT text, so that someone hearing the page can tell where one image stops and another starts.

META Tags

Description:
The Description Tag is just as important as the Title Tag of your page fro some Search Engines. When a user searches on one of the Search Engines, it is going to bring back millions of results with only the Title and then the Description of each web site. While Google pays attention to the Description tag it doesn't give it much relevance and only delivers results that show the words searched for from the page content.

Keywords:
The Keywords Tag used to be the one of the keys to search engine optimization. While this isn't the case anymore, Keywords are still of some importance to some Search Engines (not Google) and can be used to benefit your web site.

Keywords should contain words or phrases that are relevant to the content of your web site, and should stay within the guidelines of the Search Engines.

Remember that although some people will either put all of their keywords on each page, or will try to optimize one page for all of the keywords. This is not good practice.

The Keywords tag is not viewable by the visitor to the site as it resides in the HTML coding of the site. The tag is only used by search engines and directories as a reference to what search results your web site should be in. If you use the Keyword Tag, remember this: you can separate the keywords by commas, but if you do, do not put a space after the commas. This will cause the Search Engines to see this as an empty space, and also is wasting space in your code.

Another thing to remember is that there is a range of 'Stop' words for Search Engines and they should be used as sparingly as possible while still maintaining legible phrases.

'Stop' words are those that are ignored due to their abundant use and include:
a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, from, how, I, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, we, what, when, where, which, with etc etc.

Keyword Research

The Internet is just too big with too much information for even the largest search engines to index (Google has 15,000 servers!). The only way a search engine can try to organise the mass of information available on the Internet is by the use of keywords and links.

If a web page contains enough keywords related to a certain topic, there is a more than fair chance that it should be relevant to a search for information on that particular topic.

So part of search engine optimisation is to make sure the web pages target the keywords that people search for when looking for products, services or information related to what the web page offers.

The variety of keywords used to search for the same product, service or information is immense and the fact is, unless a page contains all of the keywords in a search query, it will have very little chance of appearing at the top of the rankings - and maybe not even show at all.

Before web pages can be optimised, it is an idea to conduct some research to determine which keywords to target. This involves finding targeted keywords, determining their popularity, assessing the amount of competition, and then deciding which keywords to use in your web pages.

Search Engine Optimisation Training Courses / SEO Training Courses.