British Council-Effective websites

Transcript of the podcast

Reeta: I’ve looked at your website and the overall design and layout is very good. There are just a few aspects that need to be improved so that it’s optimised for search engines

?Anthony: I don’t want to sound stupid, but what exactly is search engine optimisation

Reeta: Don’t worry. Please feel free to ask as many questions as you want. I prefer my clients to understand what I’m doing. Search engine optimisation is basically making sure that search engines can find your website, and then that your potential customers can also find it

?Anthony: I see. So this doesn’t just happen automatically

.Reeta: No, if a site isn’t optimised it could just get lost out there, as it were

?Anthony: So, what do we need to do

Reeta: We need to make sure that your website, and your homepage in particular, includes the relevant keywords

?Anthony: Just a minute. What are keywords

Reeta: Those are the words a person types into a search engine. Your company sells wooden toys, so an obvious keyword phrase is wooden toys

?Anthony: OK, how do we include them

Reeta: We make sure that the content, the text your customer is going to read, includes these words several times. The trick is to make it still sound natural, so that customers aren’t put off

Anthony: And this will mean that when a customer searches for ‘wooden toys’ they’re more likely to find my site

Reeta: That’s right. We also need to think about what other searches your potential customers could be making. For example, ‘child’s birthday present’, and include these key words. I’ll rewrite all the content to optimise it for keywords

?Anthony: Great. What else are you going to do

.Reeta: I need to change your title tags

?Anthony: What’s a title tag

Reeta: It’s the code that creates the words that appear in the top bar of the browser. At the moment yours say things like ‘Page 2’ and ‘Page 3’. We need to change these so they include your company name and some of the keywords

?Anthony: Anything else

Reeta: Yes, the search engines prefer sites that have new content added to them, so I suggest that we regularly update the information on your site. For example, you could highlight a different toy every month, or run special campaigns at different times of the year, such as Christmas. This will keep the search engine spiders visiting your site

?Anthony: Spiders

Reeta: Yes. A spider is a program which searches the internet for web pages. Then it sends the page to a search engine. So search engines use spiders to find new and changed pages. It’s important that spiders can find your site

…Anthony: Well, I didn’t know there were spiders on the internet. Now, another thing

:Answers

N1. e N2. c N3. b N4. a N5. d