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Top tips for SEO
AF
There are many different techniques to make your site more search engine friendly and increase its visibility to potential customers without resorting to cheating.
Homepage Text
A lot of consideration should always go into writing homepage text. No matter how much text there is, it should be concise and reader-friendly, written primarily for your customers and only secondarily for search engines. According to their own Guidelines, Google frowns upon keyword stuffing. They recommend you create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Always be sure to make any site content reader-friendly, search engine bots may analyse your site, but only humans buy your products.
Meta Tags
There is no need for meta tags to be full of keywords. The Description Tag should ideally be a one or two sentence summary of your services or products with only a couple of keyword phrases in it. Over repetition of keywords in Meta Tags can be considered spamming by the search engines. There is also no point in including endless list of keywords in the Keyword Meta Tag. Google does not read them.
Page Titles
Page titles provide great opportunities for SEO in e-commerce websites. A database driven website can automatically include your company name, product category and product name in every page title. It is important that every page has a unique, keyword rich title. But, as always, don't simply keyword stuff. Google can detect such practices, even repeating a keyword twice can be considered spamming.
Alt Tags
Alt tags are the alternative text used to replace an image when someone views your site using a screen reader. Under the current anti-discrimination laws, image alt tags are a legal requirement. They should above-all accurately describe the image for visually-impaired visitors, but may also be a chance for another keyword. However, the technique of stuffing alt tags with keywords is well known to Google and they have the tools to detect it.
SEO friendly URLs
Search engines will be able to read your website URLs and each should therefore display product category and product name. A correctly built database will generate URLs with plain words listed rather than something like php?id=1
Should we focus on search engines besides Google?
It may seem narrow-minded to spend so much time pandering to one particular search engine, but in the UK during May 08, 87% of all Internet searches were done through Google (source: hitwise.co.uk).