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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising websites to perform well in search engines - i.e. naturally appearing earlier in the search results.

InstantPro offers users the option to edit the 'Meta tags' of each page you create. Meta tags define what your site and it's content is about, by providing a Meta Title, Meta Description and Keywords in the code that makes the website.

By carefully choosing words that people are likely to search for (keywords) and also using these in the Meta Title and Description, this will help search engines relate your page to the words or phrases that you define.

For example, if your website is about designing websites, your keywords may include 'website design, web sites, webdesign' etc.

An important means of SEO is also by including your chosen keywords and phrases in your pages' content and even images too! You can easily do this whilst creating new pages using the InstantPro text editor.

The meta options in the image above will appear each time you begin to create a new page, after selecting 'Show Advanced Settings'. You can then begin to enter your keywords and meta description in the labelled boxes.

1. To edit the meta data after you have already created a page, simply open the website builder from the MyFreeola Control Panel and select the large 'Page Manager' button from the 'Site Overview' page.

2. Then select the edit icon next to the page that you wish to edit.

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3. Select 'Page Settings' at the top of the page. This will bring up the options that allow you to change your keywords and other meta data.

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4. Lastly, enter your keywords and other meta data in to the relevent boxes and press the 'Update' button.

InstantPro also offers you the choice to specify 'alt' (alternative) text for any images that you use in the builder. This is another good way of optimising your website for search engines. The purpose of these tags is to display alternative text for disabled visitors that may be visually impaired, or if your image fails to load.

Search engines will also take this information in to account when identifying the content of your page.

1. To add an alt tag to an image, when editing a page select the image that you want to add an alt tag to. Then, click the Image button in the text editor menu.

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This will bring up the image options where you can specify many different attributes for your images. The 'Mouseover Keyword Text' is where you need to enter your alternate text.

1. You can also add alt tags to images that are included in your Online Gallery. To do this, firstly select 'Edit Gallery Pages' from the 'Site Overview' page.

On this page you will see options to add a 'Title Tag' (which works the same way as an alt tag).

2. Select 'Click here to enter a Title Tag' to open up a text box.

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3. Then type your title (alt) tag content in to the text box provided. Your caption text will also be added to the title tag, should you decide to add a caption for your image.

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4. Lastly, click 'Update' when you are finished.

Remember that the address (URL) of your web page will also be added to the search engine. When using InstantPro to create new pages, you can again include keywords or phrases in the Page Name to further help with SEO and help search engines clearly define what your page content is about.

For more information on how to edit Page Names, please see the Managing Page & File Names article.

To stop search engines finding your half-finished, work-in-progress pages, you can also choose to turn pages offline or online. Also, when you are editing or updating pages, you can create a copy of a page to modifiy so that you do not make any changes directly to the live version. For more information on how to do this, please see the Turning Pages Live / Offline tutorial.

A sitemap or 'site map' is quite like a index or glossary. They are for representing the architecture of a website, thus helping search engines find (and store) all of your pages. On a sitemap you would expect to see a list of every single page on your website with a link to it, usually in hierarchical order. Search engines will generally only follow a finite number of links on a web page, so if a site is particularly large, a site map may be required so that search engines (and also your visitors!) can access all content on the site.

One of the most important factors is the amount of other different websites that are linking to your website. Getting 'back links' from other people makes search engines think that your website has good or important information of which others would enjoy. This in turn helps to boost your placement in the search results. It is often considered to be more beneficial to have more links coming in to your site, rather than having more links going out to others, so try not to be too generous!

Freeola provides every one of their hosting or InstantPro users the option to add their site to Freeola's Customer Site Directory. Register your site today to get listed and improve your online presence.

Google have a very useful 'Webmaster Tools' service that allows you to further optimise your website for Google. It is one of the best means for helping them, to help you. Here you can submit a sitemap of your website to Google and generally find lots of information to do with what information Google finds on your website and what people are searching for on Google in order to get to your website!

There are even options for prompting Google to search over (crawl) your website and find any errors across your pages where you may link to a page that doesn't exist or has moved, for example! Google's Webmaster Tools is most certainly worth signing up for.

Find out how to verify your website with InstantPro, for use with Google's Webmaster Tools by following this tutorial.

Managing Page & File Names »

Turning Pages Live / Offline »

Verify with Google Webmaster Tools »