Effective Search Engine Optimisation with FolioEdit
This post is about how to take the first steps towards optimising a FolioStop site for search engines, and winds up with a look at a real customer site that has done this to good effect.
FolioEdit makes it very simple to add meta tags to every page, which is the starting point for search engine optimisation.
Firstly, you can set global tags for the whole site. To do this select the SEO tab in the main window, as shown in the screenshot below:
Screenshot showing the FolioEdit global SEO settings tab
You can also add page specific tags to each and every page, whether it is a text page, gallery, or other media page. If you set specific tags for a page these over-ride your global tags, but only for that page.
Most important is the page Title, as this tells the search engine what the page is about. The Keywords tag plays less of a role than it used to (and in fact Google now ignores it completely) but it is good practice to list keywords that are relevant to the content of that page. The Description tag has no affect on SEO itself, but the text entered for the description tag is what will show in Google search listings, so choose something that will help a prospective visitor decide if your page is relevant to their search when they are browsing their search results.
Setting these tags is a good start, but there is plenty more to be addressed.
The next thing to consider is the text itself on your site. If you don’t have much text, then you are not giving the search engine much to work with. Put simply, if you consider your target audience, then try to imagine what search phrases they might enter into Google when searching for sites like yours. These words need to feature prominently in the text on your website. At the page level, also make sure that your most important keywords are in the page Title.
Note: You need to be careful not to over-do the repetition of keywords in your text as you will end up filling your pages with junk text. This is called keyword stuffing and will most likely put off prospective visitors, and could also lead to your site getting blacklisted in the search engines. As a rule of thumb, if it reads well then it is probably OK.
There is a great deal more to SEO than this post touches on, but hopefully this should provide a good starting point.
To finish off this post I want to take a look at a FolioStop customer who has managed to gain a good search engine position for her B&B in the Loire Valley in France. La Bellevue offers Loire Wine Tours as a side business to their B&B set-up. Sarah Jane has written her site page titles and text effectively enough for Google to grant her site position 8 for the search “Loire Wine Tours”. Here is a screen-shot of a section of the Google page 1 results for that search as of 20th May 2010 (3rd row from bottom – www.domainedelabellevue.com):
One last thing to point out, SEO is something that needs to be maintained. This position in the results can change any time due to other websites publishing more relevant content, so you have to keep working at improving your site text.
