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Search Engine Optimisation - (page still under construction)
What is search engine optimisation?
Firstly, SEO is more than one thing. It is a variety of techniques and procedures that, when combined, can make a huge impact in the ranking of your website on the search engines.
Why is SEO important when you can get instant results with pay per click advertising?
The easy answer is that if you stop paying for PPC it instantly loses you business, whereas SEO is more robust and long lasting. Pay Per Click can also be very expensive, although it is a useful tool in your web site marketing strategy. Search engine optimisation provides search results that are generally more trusted and, bearing in mind that around 80% of web site traffic arrives via a search engine 'tuning' your web pages in line with guidannce from Google, Yahoo et al is always going to be more cost effective than not doing it.
How do you optimise your site?
The principles of search engine optimisation are quite simple and can be separated into a number of strands. Each gives a virtual 'tick in the box' that improves where your site appears in a search return:
Code
Well formed code renders, that is displays, in web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox much more quickly and efficiently than code that has errors in it. Because search engine robots (also known as 'spiders') 'see' your website as code, and not the design your site visitors view, well formed code is also indexed by them more efficiently in much the same way.
The next factor to consider is the balance of code against site content. Search engines are constantly trying to improve the quality of their search returns, this means that they want to present their users with the most relevant listings they can. In real terms, the effect is that web site pages with high text content to code ratios tend to appear higher up in a search return than those weighted the other way. The search engine robots, when indexing a web page, will assume the page is rich in content if the code is kept to a minimum.
So how do you reduce the code content? The simple answer is to use cascading stylesheets (CSS) to handle the way the elements on the page are displayed ('marked up' - in developer speak). Most website developers these days use CSS to tell the browser how to display the text and links on the websites they build, however, it is also possible to use CSS to handle the markup for position all the page elements in a design. Images can be placed, text areas assigned set widths and postitioned, you can even use CSS for style effects like drop shadows. An example of a drop shadow can be seen on one of the sites built by Shopfitter - www.carron-restaurant.co.uk (see the food menu) and a picture gallery with pop-up images at www.villaturkuaz.com (roll your mouse over the images in the right column). Many of these have been devised by Stu Nicholls at www.cssplay.co.uk and are well worth a look if you're keen to learn more. Using CSS for page layout removes the need for complex, and therefore code heavy, table structures entirely.
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