Optimising your article for search engines

Most people come to articles on Designing Buildings Wiki straight from Google. To make sure your article attracts a lot of readers, you need it to come as high as possible in search results. This isn't complicated. Google is designed to find things that users want, so all you have to do is make it clear your article provides things users want.

• Make sure the title of your article is a phrase that people are likely to search for. A good trick for finding out what people search for is to start typing your title into google and see what it predicts you are trying to find – then use that for your title.
• Don't make your title too general. The title 'Appointing consultants' could relate to any industry, 'Appointing consultants for construction projects' is more self-explanatory and likely to rank higher in search results.
• Make sure you repeat key phrases people are likely to search for throughout your article.
• Don’t use acronyms. If your article is about ground source heat pumps, write ground source heat pumps not GSHP. Nobody searches for acronyms.
• Link your article to other sources of information.
• Create links to your article from other sites. You can do this by adding links from your own website, or by posting links on social media.
• If your article is really long, think about breaking it up into several shorter articles. This can help build a critical mass about your subject.
• Add images to your article and put phrases people are likely to search for in the image description. If the only information you provide about your image is that it's pict2001344.jpg, Google (and readers of your article) are not going to know what it is.
• Keep improving your article. Articles that were last edited in 2001 will have slipped down the search results no matter how good they are.

That’s it. It’s really not complicated but it makes a huge difference.