IDS Hosting & Website Development

What you need to know before starting your website?

If you are relying on a search engine to find your website and bring you traffic there are a number of things you need to know long before starting your website:

• search engines use a very complex calculation to rate your website
• each search engine uses there own uniqure calculations, some of which do overlap
• top 5 search engines make up >99% of all search engine traffic
• Google (72%), Yahoo (14%), Bing (10%), Ask (2%), AOL Search (1%) source
• about 75% of search engines ranking calculations information are done 'off site'.
• you have full control of the approx.25% 'on site' factors.
• Search Engine optimization (SEO) is not an after thought!

Using Words & Keywords to your advantage  

• Good websites need to work around one or more keywords that best explains the website function. 
• Know what these words are before you even think of a design.
• Shape the websites look & feel, text and images around these keywords.

• Use keywords in your page title tags. Title & keyword must relate to the webpage contents
• Keywords to be used in the URL's, eg: http://idshosting.co.za/hosting.htm
• The density of your main word/s is important, not more than 7-8%, and 2-3% for minor words.
• Use Keywords in H1 & H2 heading tags.
• Keep the 1st two paragraphs of your articles keyword rich, without stuffing in keywords that dont read well.
• Make sure you use the 'alt ' tags with your images, and that the text is relevant to the image which can be a keyword/s.
• Keyword meta tags are used less & less by search engines, but still to be filled in correctly.
• Use phrases that further explains your websites function, like: Hosting websites.
• Be careful not to dilute your keywords with unrelated words, this will confuse the search engines.
• Stuffing keywords will do more harm than good, especially if words & background colours are the same.