TrafficThere is no point in developing a website unless visitors can find it. The majority of your traffic is going to be from online search engines like Google and Bing.  By creating search engine friendly pages, you will have a better chance of increasing your search engine ranking and acquire more visitors.

Search engines like Google and Bing make use of programs called robots or spiders to index every website on the Internet and to analyse your web page, put it through a number of tests which they then use to decide how to rank your site.

Things you can do to help make your web pages search engine friendly include:

Stop making use of old HTML tags like <table> to design your page. Since it is more reliable and efficient to use the CSS (Cascading Design Sheets). By utilizing CSS, you can remove redundant HTML tags and make your pages much smaller and load quicker. You can of course use tables for tabular data rather than giving yourself a headache trying to use CSS.

Content in images
Do not show your website content inside images. Search engine spiders can cannot read them and therefore they will not help your search engine ranking. If you were to present the same information as text you will find your websites search engine popularity growing. While infographics have their place in search engine marketing never be tempted to use them as a replacement for content.

Description Tag
Use the description meta tags appropriately on each and every page of your website while this will not help that are search engine ranking, most search engines will show the content of your description tag on the search engine results so you can use this to make your page look more enticing on the search engine results.

Page Load Speed
One thing that Google counts as important is how quickly your page loads you can make your pages load faster by using PHP compresssion and minifying your scripts. We will be writing tutorials on how to do this in the coming weeks.

Duplicate Content
If you use a content management system such as WordPress to manage a website, you may notice that a lot of other pages content is being duplicated via category pages, author pages etc. You can optimise WordPress in order to reduce this as much as possible.

Hidden Text
Years ago you used to be able to fix search engines by using hidden text throughout your website stuffing it with relevant keywords these days that “technique” is almost guaranteed to make sure that your site will never rank for anything. To see if your site has any hidden text just hit ctrl +A when your web browser is open and it will be easily seen.

These are just a few things you can do to start optimising your website and making more search engine friendly pages.  There are a lot of other things you can do and these will be covered in future articles.

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