Having the best web content in the world is of little use if no one knows about it, or if it gets pushed down the list in the search engines. After you have created your great content you should always spend some time thinking about how to optimise it to make it stand out above the crowd. There are a number of things you can do in and around your content that can help it get seen above other similar content and this useful, but sometimes misunderstood, practice is known as SEO – Search Engine Optimisation.

David Radisic, SEO specialist at Dr Adept, has kindly guest written the following tips highlighting some of the methods you can quickly and easily perform to help optimise your content ready for publishing.

As a web designer I have always strived to conform to the standards while creating sites that are easy to navigate by the user as well as being easy to find and index by the search engines.

I always design for the visitor first and then the search engines, even when undertaking an SEO you must consider the site visitor first as they are the most important reason you have created the site, when your visitors arrive they don’t want to be confronted by a load of meaningless text put in place to improve the search engine hits, this is a sure way of losing visitors.

All web pages have a head section which is hidden from general view but can be accessed using the View Source option usually found in the View drop down menu of most browsers.

Title tag, Keyword Meta tag and description Meta tags are used to give the search engine information relevant to the page.

Don’t cram these with as many keywords as possible, this can lead to search engines looking at your page as containing spam, too much in one place is not good. I use the method of helping the visitor first then the search engines and so identify the page details then the important keywords then the website or company name.

Your title tag should be unique for every page on your site and look something like this: <title> PAGE DETAILS / KEYWORDS / NAME OR BRANDING </title>.

Having your page details first helps the visitors to know where they are, not forgetting that the title tag and meta description will show in the search engines results pages which people click on, so, for example, having the word “technology” listed several times just because it is your main keyword will not look good to them and so most likely they will not click it, I know I don’t.

I suppose that is the main thing about SEO, you should consider what you would do when searching for products and services and then use that knowledge to adjust your site details.

When looking at your keyword list think of how people would search for your products or services and remember they may mistype some words, this is important as when searching often words are mistyped and if you have that same spelling mistake then you could be the only one in the search results. One of my first sites, internationalcamp.co.uk, I mistyped didgeridoo as dijerido among other spellings and mine was the only site listed with that spelling and so the Didgeridoo man got quite a bit of work from it. This is not so much an issue these days as the search engines use spell checkers during searches and give the correct spelling options but they still display results using your bad spelling.

Within the page itself, use the headings tags H1 through H6 to identify the level of importance for each section of content using your keywords, and within your content make other keywords bold.

Now to the most important part of getting to the top of the search engines, authority, if you have a website that is informative and contains information people need and find useful then others will want to link to and recommend your site, this is the holy grail of website achievement as your site will rise to top.

This article was written by David Radisic of Dr Adept; learn more about the services offered by David and download his free SEO guide at his web site at http://www.dradept.com/

This article was brought to you by Jason Slater Technology Blog