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Search Engine Optimisation – Overview

There are two parts to Search Engine Optimisation:

• On page – everything that’s physically on your page on your site.
• Off page – everything else on the internet that’s pointing to your site.

You should have total control of the on page side of things – it’s your site.

That said, if you use a free host for your website, you may have less control than you’d like. It’s well worth the small extra cost to buy your domain name and rent hosting:

Domain names:

• Namecheap – recommended for all extensions apart from .co.uk. Good pricing, no annoying “up-sells”, good support.
• 123-Reg – cheap for .co.uk domains.

Hosting:

• Hostgator – USA based hosting. Good, flexible, standard control panel, 24/7 live support (you may briefly be held in a queue online but once connected to a support person, you’re with them until any issues are resolved).
• 1&1 Internet – UK hosting. Good quality, often run introductory offers. Non-standard control panel but plenty of support (often quicker to search Google than to contact support unless your package includes telephone support)

The first part of this course will deal with on page factors. Although there are said to be around 200 factors, we’ll only cover the important factors that are worth spending your time on.

• Page title – the most important factor.
• Page description – used to give Google hints about your page.
• Headline – the same as a newspaper headline, it needs to grab attention.
• Page content – the words people read.
• Image names – often ignored but actually quite important.
• Accessibility – both for internet users and search engines.
• Links – to your own site and to other sites.

We’ll cover each of these in detail in the next few lessons. It’s worth taking the time to get each of them right.

The next part of this course deals with optimising your page titles.