Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) means designing your website to increase the likelihood that it will appear early in the results when a potential customer searches for the products and services that you offer.
Links
Good quality links have the following characteristics:
- Come from a website with similar content (ie tourism websites)
- Come from websites that are themselves popular.
- Have relevant text in the links. (For example, “Go here for great hotels in Donegal” is better than “Click here for great hotels in Donegal”.)
Tip: To check how many links your website has, go to google.com and search for “link: yourwebsiteaddress.com”.
Here are some more points about links to consider:
- Links from your website to others can help with your search engine ranking. However, links from other websites to your website are better.
- If you have a lot of links from other websites onto your own, Google thinks you are a popular website and gives you a higher search engine ranking.
- Links from websites with similar content (e.g., tourism) are the best type of links to have.
- Links from popular (ie high traffic) website count more.
- Avoid simple link lists (for example, creating webpages called simply 'links').
- Create a standard e mail text and send it out to your suppliers and/or Attraction and Activities Suppliers listed on your website showing the page on your site where they are listed and request a link to your own website.
Meta Tags
Meta tags provide information about the web page, primarily to search engines. There are three basic types of meta tags: title, description, and keywords. The title meta tag seems to be used more than the others by Google. When someone does a Google search, Google tends to favour web pages that contain the keywords in the title meta tag. These pages are more likely to be listed early in the results.
Here are some general guidelines for using title meta tags:
- Vary them across different pages.
- The title meta tag should match the content on the page.
- Don’t carry out 'keyword stuffing' (for example, repeating the keywords 'Donegal Hotels, Donegal Hotels, Donegal Hotels on the same page).
- Dont use more than about 10 words.