More Handy DIY Search Engine Optimisation Tips

• Make it easy for visitors to move around your site and find what they're looking for
   
• Keep navigation the same on every page
   
• Identify your key products/services. Create navigation pages from these key elements. For FatGalah it's web design, seo, web application development, hosting
   
• Place your most important pages first on the navigation bar
   
• Try and use your keywords in your navigation tabs
   
• If you have a dropdown menu, the search engines will read the order of the dropdown box before crawling through to the next menu tab.
   

Site Structure

• Consider how many clicks it takes for a visitor to navigate before getting to their final destination i.e the reason they came to your website. Any more that three (3) clicks and you might find your bounce rates (visitors leaving your site) climb.
   
• Use keyword-rich anchor text to link to other pages in your website. This will not only help visitors navigate to other relevant areas of your site, but will also assist in your search engine optimisation.
   
• Links within the content of your website carry more weight than links in footers or side menus.
   

Alt Tags / Alt Text

If you're using images on your website then it's essential that you add alt tags.

Search engine crawlers are not able to "read" images so by providing descriptive text in your alt tag, you'll ensure that the content is indexed and ranked. It also allows your images to be displayed in image search results. They also allow vision impaired visitors to access the content on your website.

• Keep short.
• Provide a clear description of the image.
• Add keywords.
   

Check for Broken Links

Broken links are not only frustrating for website visitors, but they also hurt your search engine optimisation efforts.

When a search engines comes across a lot of broken linked page errors on your website it diminishes the value of your website.

• Use Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools to monitor any broken links you may have.
• Fix internal links by changing the link or 301 re-directing the old link.
• External links can be removed or an alternative link found.
   

Check Page Load Speed

In Google's own words "Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there." (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html)
 

• You can check your page load speed in Google Analytics under Reporting -> Content -> Site Speed -> Overview
   
• There's lots of addons for most browsers that allow you to check your website's page load speed.

Contact FatGalah if you need some extra help in optimising your website for targeted traffic.