How to drive visitors to your web pages
In deciding to rank a website, search engines pay a lot of attention to the actual content they find on a website.
The essence of what a search engine focuses on is the words that people search for.
The words people use when searching are the ultimate distillation of what they care about. Search is an activity that strips things down to their essential meaning.
The customer is king
If we want our website to be successful at being found by people who search, we must use their keywords, not the council's. The customer, not the council, controls the message today. It is the customer’s language that dictates the communication. So we must use their words, not ours, if we want to be found.
Here's an example unconnected with local government. In a given month, thousands of people will search the internet for “low fares” but millions will search for “cheap flights”. Low fares is airline industry language. Cheap flights is consumer language. If you want to get found, you must use the words of your customer.
Eight key steps to better search engine rankings
Stick with one clear idea for each webpage. In this age of attention deficit, people like communication that is clear and single-minded; so do search engines, who find it easier to rank a webpage that focuses on a particular theme than one that covers many themes.
Lead with your top keywords. It’s not a murder mystery. Lead with the need and start every sentence with your customers’ most important words. Unless the first couple of words in a sentence are compelling, people won’t read on. Search engines are aware of this and give words closer to the beginning of the sentence a higher importance.
Use phrases and word combinations rather than single words. People are increasingly searching with two to three words because that’s returning better results. If you’re selling cheap flights to Dublin then you’ll probably find that people are searching using the following combination “cheap flight Dublin”.
Repeat your top keywords. As a general rule, you should repeat your most important keywords in both your heading and summary, and roughly three times every hundred words thereafter. That’s because if people see their keywords repeated they tend to feel that that piece of content is more relevant. Search engines recognise this.
Highlight sub-headings with the sub-heading format feature as this helps to break up the text on your pages and makes reading easier.
Use bold to highlight summary (introductory) text. Bold helps to emphasise the importance of this content, and search engines give content that is bolded an extra value. BUT don't use bold throughout your content. Bold can be useful when you really want to stress something but in general text using bold can make the writing feel pushy and preachy.
Writing quality links is one of the most undervalued web writing skills. Links are points of action and great web content facilitates action. Do not use low value (and innaccessible) link phrases such as “click here”. Get your keywords into your links. Your links are like signposts and should give people as much information as possible about where they will go if they click.
Of course, the key point in all these rules is that you write for your reader, not for your ego and not for the search engine. The content must engage the reader. It must be compelling and clear.
If people feel they are being preached at or pushed toward a certain action, it’s very easy to hit the Back button.
Example from Google: a search for 'Salford parks"
The image at the top of this page (there's a larger version just below this paragraph too) illustrates an example of poor search result when looking for 'Salford parks'. Using the tips shown above there's a very good chance the search engine ranking could be improved.
This page was last updated on 21 September 2006
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