Hi All,

Just wondering if there is anyone here who know about optimising things in order to get the best google rankings.

I've got a friend who is just setting up in business, and specialises in producing low cost, high quality promotional films for charities. They are a non-profit organisation, and really need some help in getting better visibility.

Currently, they are building their website in iWeb, and using a product called iMap to create their sitemap.xml stuff. I've signed them up for a Google webmaster account, and submitted their sitemap etc., but they just don't come anywhere when I do a search for them.

Does anyone have some tips on the right Google Fu to improve things for them?

Their website is: http://www.environmentfilms.org

Thanks,

Andy.

Generic SEO tips include;

- Ensure the title tag is concise and relevant to what they want to rank for, but do NOT flood it with keywords. Just having "home" is definitely not a good start!

- Correct use of hierarchical headings - h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6. Use h1 for top level page headings and then the others for sub headings of one another.

- Although thesedays they have little effect, ensure you do have meta keywords and descriptions and keep them concise.

- Use in context text links. If you're talking about "promotional films", link "promotional films" to the services page, which describes promotional films. This can be done throughout your site. My advice would be to try to make it so that you can get to every page in your web site without ever touching the navigation - give it a go.

Additionally:

- Sign up to google webmaster tools to see if there are any problems with the search engines crawling your site

- Sign up to google analytics, see which phrases you rank well on (on the incoming traffic - search engines section) and try to improve the ones which aren't appearing in the lists.

My general adivce would be to just keep it sensible. Don't do anything on your website such as filling pages with unnecessary keywords, filling the title tag with unnecessary keywords etc - if you make your site VERY relevant to your keywords for a human user, and make it easy to stumble through, then google will at some point rank your site well.

This isn't gospel but it's the general approach i've taken with Zetor Tractor Dealer - LW Yarnold Ltd to get it to rank well for "teagle machinery", "zetor tractors", "zetor dealer", "rozmital grassland" and other such keywords

Any questions let me know!

EDIT: forgot to say - include relevant alt tags for your images. I've done this on that website above and we get hundreds of incoming links a day from google image search - every little helps!

EDIT 2: forgot to include the all important link to google's own pages on the subject here and here

Thanks for that. Good tips there.

Colin has also just e-mailed me about this, with some more great tips. Thanks Colin.

Bagpuss.

Well, Colin seems pretty good at it!