Online advertising is now an important component of some of the most successful branding campaigns. In just 10 years it has overtaken cinema, surpassed radio and is on target to reach outdoor in terms of advertising spend. It now reaches 61% of the UK’s population – that’s 28.7 million people. Click below for some of the key reasons for this phenomenal growth.

5 Essential SEO Techniques

Search Engine Optimization is becoming a more and more complicated area especially with the recent updates and data refresh done on the search engines' index. However, the basic concept for good ranking does not change. The following illustrates five most important SEO techniques as summarized from the Google Webmaster Guidelines that all webmasters should follow.

The first step into SEO is to create a site that allows the bots from the search engines to crawl. A web page is as good as offline if it does not appear in the search engine's index. It is advised to use clean and static urls for a page rather than lengthy url with complicated parameters.

It is stated clearly in the Google Webmaster Guidelines that they do not index urls with session ids. In addition, they will not index pages that require user authentication as the bots visit pages like a general user. Search engines also cannot guarantee that they will index all the dynamic urls. Therefore, in order to facilitate the search engines in crawling all the pages, static urls are always preferred.

The second technique is to create a site that holds unique and fresh content. Search engines like to index fresh content. A frequently updated site will find the bots returning to visit at a shorter interval. Adding unique content regularly will also help other users to find the site more easily as these pages will add on to the respective domain’s search index in the search engine database.

Third technique is equally important as it ensures that search engines can crawl every page in a site successfully. Having a text link navigation system is highly recommended for SEO purposes as it is almost guaranteed that the bots will visit all the pages via the text links. Avoid using JavaScript and Flash navigation system, as the bots will ignore them. Implement a Google Sitemap is also recommended, as this will help the search engines to find any pages that may be missed during the crawl.

After implementing a search engine friendly navigation system, the Webmaster should focus on the keywords allocation and place the targeted keywords in appropriate places. Of the entire HTML markup, the most important tags to take note are the title and the headers. It is advised to have a different title for every page and to adopt a proper hierarchy of headers so that search engines know what are the content that the pages are focusing.

The final step towards a good search engine ranking is to attract organic links. Organic links are natural links from content related pages. Google only takes into account of these natural links when ranking and indexing pages as stated in their guidelines. Although linking from the unrelated pages does not hurt its rankings, they will not help either.

Tan Kok Chuan