Web Branding

The secret of launching or re-launching a website that will rank high in the search engine results comes down to good planning. You must first endeavour to lay the correct foundations for your website.


The first and most important rule that should never be overlooked is the domain name.

Your domain name holds the most SEO weighting. Your domain name will be included on all your web pages, links, contacts, articles, blog posts and much more. Choose a keyword rich and descriptive domain name. See this as the keystone, it will lock all the other stones in position and without a strong, correctly shaped stone the whole structure will collapse.

Page Titles / Title Tags

The second most important element of a website should be your page titles. A search engine will look to this title as a description of a webpage. The title of your homepage should act as a description for your website as a whole. Use keyword rich language but ensure your title is relevant.
A few key pointers to take on board:

• The optimal character length of a page title should not exceed 70 characters. This includes spaces. Since November 2010, Google now allow 70 characters, previously this was 66. If you want to ere on the side of caution limit yourself to 65.

• Bear in mind the importance of the page title and therefore use your most effective and relevant keywords.

H1, H2, H3 tags

H1, H2 & H3 title tags will be used where necessary in order to demonstrate to Search Engines which parts of the code relate to product titles.

All these tags should be put to good use by including keyword rich headings. The heading tags are an important Search Engine Optimisation on-page feature, apart from the domain and title tag this is the third most important feature. Endeavour to make the best use of these key features within your website. Once again make good use of header tags. They should help search engines acquire a measure of content importance from your page.

Meta Descriptions

The Meta-description tag will be placed between the tags in your HTML page.

Some website directories and certain search engines may use this meta description as a little bit of descriptive blurb when showing a link to your website. The Meta Descriptions should adhere to appropriate length of no more than 160 characters.

• Sell yourself within this description as this may well appear below your listing in the search engine results pages.

• Once again, make sure your description is relevant to the page it describes.

The final stage foundation laying is the main body content. As with the points made earlier for title tags make sure you use keyword rich content and it is relevant to the descriptions with prominent call to actions at the end of each section or paragraph. Try not to exceed 400 words of content per page.