Long time ago in a galaxy… not so far away, a very first internet search engine was born :). It was 25 years ago and it name was “Archie”. To be accurate it wasn’t really a proper search engine. It did search only among its catalogue of websites created by one of “Archie” founders, or more likely we should call them “documents” at that date. Things were simple these times because by the end of the year 1994 there was only approximately 10000 websites in total. Considering that growing trend, simplest websites catalogues like “Archie” became inefficient. Year 1994 itself was a great year for a innovative web search engines. Most of us know “Yahoo”, “Lycos”, “Webcrawler” and some other will also remember “Altavista”, “Infoseek”. Nobody yet expected a major game-changing player. In 1996 This player happened to be “BackRub” later renamed to “Google”.

Google used innovative engine that has never been seen before (it ranked pages using citation notation, meaning any mention of a website on another site would count it as a vote toward the mentioned site). Website developers started thinking, “how would it be possible to manipulate these search results so my website will be shown higher than another?”. SEO was the answer. SEO – states for Search Engine Optimisation. In simple words it’s optimising search engine so when someone is entering search phrase in google (or any other search engine) it can more likely match these “keywords” to your website instead of any other competing website. Througout the years Google developed more sophisticated ways of ranking pages so the SEO techniques had to change as well.

Every business owner is aware of google potential, because higher google search result position will simply give you more visitors, and visitors can be converted to customers.

In this article we’ll show you 6 quick SEO tips on how to optimise your website so it can be easily found on Google but not only.

1. Site structure and navigation

While building your website make sure you spend at least half an hour thinking of its structure. You want it to be simple and clear and all pages are easy to find, are not separated and provide links in and out. File hierarchy and site maps are crucial in getting a high ranking page. Build a clear and simple navigation menu, optionally you can repeat the same menu at the bottom of your website. That won’t only help search engines to explore your site but will also help your visitors to find the most valuable content they are looking for.

2. Content

Valuable and unique content is the most important key to climb the “ladder of SEO”. If it’s possible, I would reccomend writing a blog on your website. Try to craft a content that will bring value to your site so the visitors will have a reason to visit your website and on the other hand search engines will reward longer and unique posts.

3. Keywords and meta

Keywords Usage

Try to define the most important keywords for your page. Put them in page address (for example: “www.yourpage.ie/important_keywords.html”), in heading tag (<h1>), at least once in the content, and finally in the meta description. (for example wordpress plugin: “WordPress SEO” by Yoast Team will guide you how to do that and will estimate the overall seo consistency for you)

Snippet Preview

Meta is the little snippet on the search page showing you a brief description of what can be found on your page, or what it’s about. It’s usually up to 160 characters. You should pay the highest attention to writing a nice and most accurate meta description because that’s the best opportunity to entice visitors to click your link. If you don’t write it, Google will do that for you but it’ll put first words on your website so it won’t be so accurate as you could desire.

Meta description marked red

4. Images

Whenever it’s possible, please take your time and name all the images while uploading so instead “DCIM0038.jpg” or “IMG59.jpg” you’ll have for example “new-car-wash-opening.jpg”. Try to include the “ALT” description for the search engine crawler and that will be also helpful in case the photo won’t be loaded (for any reason).

5. Optimised URL’s

Still one of the most important things. If your page or blog entry is about portrait photography, make sure it’s address looks like: “www.yourname.ie/portrait-photography”. Avoid underscores (_) and use hyphens (-)instead and don’t join the words because separate words in: “www.yourname.ie/takingcameratotheforest” will definitely not be recognised by search engine.

6. Site loading speed

There’s no point of building breathtaking, image-packed website if its loading will take for example 10 seconds. Most of the visitors will abandon your website if it’s not fully loaded in approx. 4-5 seconds. Visit: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and check your website. You will also get suggestions on how to improve that loading time.

These quick SEO tips will allow you to optimise your website and will show you what really matters while developing the website. SEO is not an one-time-job, it’s a process that never ends, so we all should check our “Metas”, keywords, content and what’s the most important – It’s much easier to think of SEO before you start creating your website than after!