I was visiting a client recently and he asked me what were the key factors he needed to consider for search engine optimisation?

While you’ll never totally know how the search engines work, there are a number of important elements that lead to higher rankings. I summarised them for him as:

Keywords Selection and Use
•    Keywords in the title tag
•    Keywords mentioned in the body tag
•    Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have a greater influence than H1 headline tags
•    Keywords in bold or strong tags seem to have an effect
•    Keywords in image file and alt tags
•    Website that have keywords in domain name improve rankings
Web pages that use few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all rank higher
Inbound links of quality, Google rank 4 +(top links usually have 4 times as many as position 11).
Good Html Body Copy/txt – focus on what matters to visitors
HTML Page Titles
Ensure website doesn’t stop crawling
Age of domain.

He looked at me and said that seems a whole lot of work!

No I said, make a plan to spend 3 to 4 hours a week over the next three months and cover the above items. But remember, search engine optimisation is an on-going process. Once the main actions are done, monitor the results and tweak the website. then aim to spend an hour or so a week on optimisation.

I’ll let everybody know how he gets on.

David