Improving Search Engine Optimisation for your Office Live website: Tim Kimber

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Probably the most difficult thing about building your website is writing compelling copy that customers will find informative, and that search engines will recognise as being of value.

When writing copy for your website, you need to think about the type of things your potential customers will be searching for when they're looking for companies like yours. The popular search engines automatically trawl and index all new sites, picking up the keywords that customers use to search with. You can speed this process up by submitting your site to the following URLS :

Google : https://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo : https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

MSN : https://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Please note that even when making these submissions, it can still take search engines several weeks to fully index your site.

The next things you should consider is metatags and meta descriptions - the invisible bits of code that search engines often use to index websites. Log into your Office Live website, click ‘Website', then for each page click ‘Properties' then the ‘Search Engine Optimisation' tab. You will find boxes in which you can type keyword metatags and description metatags. There's a full description telling you what they are and how to write them.

The next area you might want to consider is links. Can you convince other popular websites to link to your site, in exchange to linking to them from yours ? The search engines look for these linking relationships and if they are high quality links, you can expect your search ranking to improve.

Another way to get linked and enhanced indexing is to submit your website to website directories. There are many of these directories that exist but probably the first one you should try is https://www.dmoz.org/ . You'll need to click the ‘suggest URL' link and read the text. Then, you will need to choose one of the Dmoz categories and follow the steps to be considered for a listing.