Search Engine Optimisation
People often ask us about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and how to get their websites ranked highly on Google. This blog post outlines the basics of SEO, along with some helpful hints and tips that you may find useful. Making SEO considerations on your website is imperative if you want to be found online through search engines. You may have even found this blog post by doing a Google search! People are searching for your products or services online so SEO should be part of your internet marketing strategy.
There are two main elements to SEO. These are Offsite SEO and Onsite SEO.
Onsite SEO
It’s all to do with the content on the website and we do this as standard for all of our websites.
A search engine will read a page on a website and decide what it’s about based on the content. If you want to rank for specific keyword terms then it is important that your site actually contains those words. This doesn’t mean that you need to add those keywords hundreds of times – in fact, keyword spamming is penalised by search engines. You need to make sure keywords are in the right place on the site (i.e. page titles, navigation, headings etc) and are present in the correct density.
Page Titles are very important, each website page will have a title tailored to that page but with a common theme. Our clients using Expose CMS can change their page titles easily by using the admin toolbar. Make sure keywords are in your content headings (i.e. h1. h2. h3. tags). The body text content should have keywords too, and as a general rule you should be writing unique content. Having content that is unique to your site is instrumental to ranking well. Unique content ranks better because it has less competition, and if you do copy from somewhere else you also risk getting penalised for plagiarising. Don’t get obsessed with writing website text for SEO alone – it’s primarily there for your website visitors and must be readable, engaging and sell your services.
Technical site issues – onsite SEO is also concerned with ensuring that any technical issues with the site don’t interfere with the ability of the search engines to see the content/keywords. Examples of common problems affecting this include badly coded or thought-out navigation as well as the use of Flash.
Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO is what you do away from your website, and it’s all about getting high quality links pointing back to your website. Quality of links pointing to a website are much more important than the quantity. You won’t get the number 1 position on Google by having the most links. Finding quality links is the target here and will help you rank very highly. Another website linking to your site is like a vote, and the better the quality of votes, the better your search engine positioning. On the Internet, not all websites are equal, and increasingly with offsite SEO one way links and not reciprocal links are much more powerful. Google considers a reciprocal link (you link to a site and they link back to you) as an attempt to manipulate its search engine rankings and does not carry much favour with this activity any more.
What is a ‘quality’ link? There are 2 main considerations:
Relevance. A link on a website that is relevant to the context of your product or service is weighted highly. For example, if you wanted to rank highly for ‘Web Design Leeds’ then getting links pointing to your site on websites about web design is a sure winner! Also make sure the link has relevant keywords (anchor tags). A great link for us would be web design in Leeds as the keywords are relevant to our website.
Importance and page rank of the site linking to you needs to be considered. All sites have a Google ‘page rank’. The exact way this is calculated is not known to anyone except Google but it is thought that it is an indicator of how ‘important’ a site is. Generally if a site appears to be an established authority (.gov or .ac.uk are great!) on a particular subject and has lots of similar/authority sites linking to it then the site is likely to have a very good page rank. If a website has a page rank of 0 then that means it’s either very new or not seen as important by Google. Having said that, the pagerank of a site can often be outdated, incorrect or not exist at all for various reasons, so it’s not the be all and end all of judging a website’s SEO worth.
Offsite SEO can take a long time, there is never guaranteed success and it can be costly. It’s something that you need a long term strategy for and nobody gets to the top of google without a lot of work.
Don’t be obsessed with the volume of website hits. You would be better off getting 10 hits a month from relevant searches than 1000 from irrelevant searches. People will leave your website as quickly as they found it if it’s not what they’re looking for. The key to making a website work for you is to get the right, relevant visitors to your site, and then transforming these visitors into sales leads.
We can help!
Once your website is ranking highly for the right keywords then you can rely on a steady flow of relevant website traffic which can have a huge impact on your sales and lead generation. At Snapshot Media we do SEO very well and we can discuss long term link building strategies. This ensures that Google picks the website up, ranks it for what is relevant for your business and gets you those essential leads. Get in touch if you would like to discuss this further. Find out more information about our SEO services.
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Hope this helps!