A guide to SEO

 

Want your site to appear higher in the search engines? Here's a quick guide to search engine optimisation (SEO) for your club website: Content is king In terms of search engines, the content you write on your site is golden. Well written content increases search engine ranking and traffic. A search engine is programmed to crawl each and every site it can find in a manner similar to a human. Information is stored and viewed as more or less important based upon what a human is most likely to consider important. They will rank each page on your site based on this content. For example, if your page is about widgets, but mention the word beer 20 times and widgets only once, the search engine will take the assumption that the page is about beer. Therefore, carefully placing your keywords and phrases within the context of the text helps the search engine understand what you are trying to say on your page. Also bear in mind that search engines cannot 'see' images, so text written in images does not contribute toward the overall content of the page. Linking with other sites Google uses the number of links towards your webpages as a key tool in determining your search engine ranking. The number of links are a key indicator of how popular your site is; at the end of the day, why would people link to your site unless they liked the content and wanted other people to see? Therefore, the more links you can build up, the better your ranking will be. Google also rates these links to your site; if you have 1 link from a very popular and high ranking site such as Microsoft, it is worth many links from small none-ranking sites. It's a case of where quality really does outweigh quantity. It is fairly easy to build up links. Simply find sites which are related to yours, such as other teams, the local newspaper of league websites and ask them if they will exchange links with you. Making your request personalised is much more likely to result in the link taking place than just an automated email you send out to every site you find! If you get into the habit of posting your website link where-ever possible, you will find your search engine ranking quickly improve. Post it on forums you participate in, blogs you contribute to, or even product reviews you write on ecommerce sites. Updates Search engines visit your site regularly so that they can index the site and check for updates. They soon get bored if you site stays the same for too long and will visit less regularly. Keeping your site regularly updated constantly gives the search engines new and fresh content to read and index, and search engines love content. Therefore the more you update your site, the more they will visit and the higher you will rank. Domain names Registering your own domain name will also improve your search engine ranking as it makes your site much easier to find when people search for it. For example, instead of sportstation.co.uk/clubs/my-team using www.my-team.co.uk will rank you higher on the search engines. To register your own domain name check out 123-reg, where you can register your own domain name from only £2.59 per year. Once you have your own domain name, setup domain forwarding so that anyone who enters your new domain name in their browser gets sent to your Sportstation website! You can view a PDF version of this guide here.