FolioStop Help

Before starting any search engine optimisation, you will have to register your FolioStop website with the search engines. This process is quick, simple and free.

Register your website with Google
Register your website with Yahoo

The first thing you should do to optimise your website to a basic level is make sure that you have set the default title, keywords, and description for your website.

To do this, open FolioEdit, click on the DESIGN button to open the Design Window, and then select the GOOGLE tab, as shown below:

The Title

The title is what will show in the top of the browser, as shown in the examples below:

Safari:


Firefox:


It should be meaningful for your website, and also if possible it should also contain keywords that people might search for to find your website. It is also shown as the title in the search engine results listings, as shown in the image further down the page.

Keywords

Enter words or phrases, seperated by commas, that are important to your website. Take this example; FolioStop provides a DIY website building service, so for the FolioStop website, we have phrases like "DIY website builder, low cost websites, build your own website".

Description

The description is what Google shows as the sample copy on the search engine results below the title, as shown below:


The description tag won't help your positioning as all, but it will help users understand what your site is about when they are browing results.

Google Analytics ID

This field also features in the GOOGLE tab but it is not part of this Search Engine Optimisation tutorial and can be left blank.

What a Search Engine sees

When a search engine looks at your website, all it sees is text and links. So it is important to write copy that helps the search engine decide if your site is relevant to searches.

Choosing relevent Keywords

Think about what words or phrases people will search for in Google, for which you would like your website to show up. Those words or phrases are keywords, and they need to feature in your website copy. To some extent, the more those keywords feature in your copy, the more relevent your site will be to the search. However, be warned, if you overdo this you will end up with two problems highlighted below.

Keyword Stuffing

Filling your website copy with countless repitition of keywords is known as Keyword Stuffing and should be avoided. Firstly your site copy will read very badly, which tends to annoy people, and secondly, you might get your site blacklisted on Google or other search engines. As a rule of thumb, if you feel comfortable with the way the copy reads, it is probably Ok.

When you drag in images, videos, and mp3s, to your galleries, FolioStop automatically gives these media items default titles. This is to speed up the process of setting up your site.

To optimise your site, you should open each of these media items, and give it a specific and relevant title.

An example of the sort of default title FolioEdit might give an image would be "IMAGE_1250592754593.jpg". This doesn't mean anything to Google, so give it a name that does mean something.

Double click the thumbnail for the media item to open its editor. At the top you can enter the title.

Something that can help a great deal with your search engine positioning is having a domain name that contains the search keywords that people might be searching for.

For example, if you are a furniture designer that just makes reclaimed Teak chairs, you could do very well by choosing, if possible, the domain name www.reclaimedteakchairs.com

So if you are not an established company, and have the opportunity to choose a domain name, give this some careful thought.

Multiple domain names

It should also be noted that you can have as many domain names as you like pointing to your website. So you could register a new domain in the manner above. Please note though, Google will share the relevance of your site between the domain names, so it is not always a good idea.

You can register new domains through FolioStop. Log into http://myaccount.foliostop.com and select the domains tab.

When your website first goes live on the web, don't expect it to suddenly show up in search engine results. The search engines have no idea it is there.

There are 2 ways that a search engine will find your website:

1. It follows a link from another website to your site
2. You tell it about your site

To let a search engine know about your website, you can submit your website address. To do this on Google, go to this link:

http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=/addurl

It is also worthwhile submitting your website to other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN:

Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Bing: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

NB: It can take a few weeks before your site gets listed at all.

The very best way to improve your website ranking is to have quality inbound links. That is, links from other websites to your website.

The better the ranking of the site that links to you, the higher the quality of the link.

For example, if a website with high web traffic links to your website, your site will get some of this kudos.

If a website with very little traffic and low ranking links to your site (low quality link), this will have little affect on your website ranking.

How do I get inbound links?

Contact friends, clients and suppliers with websites who might consider adding your link to their site. They will be more willing to do so if there is some relevance, and you will need to credit them by offering to add their url as a link on your site.

Any news stories or press articles, blog sites, or review sites, that can feature your link, will also provide a source of high quality inbound links.

You can also set page specific meta tags (title, keyword, description). See the section Advanced Search Engine Optimisation.

To really get to grips with how your website looks to search engines, and make adjustments accordingly to improve your SEO, set up an account with Google's Webmaster Tools.

In order to authorise your website address in your WebmasterTools account, you will need to add a meta tag to your site. You can do this using FolioEdit, just go to the SEO tab and enter the tag where indicated. (WebmasterTools will provide you with the meta tag you need to enter)

Submitting your sitemap

WebmasterTools will allow you to submit a sitemap so that Google's robots are aware of every page on your site. FolioStop sites all have a dynamic site-map that is created automatically, and can be found at:

/sitemap

You can preview the xml it generates at www.yourdomain.com/sitemap being sure of course to replace yourdomain.com with your actual website address.