Snapshot Media Web Design Leeds

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, with some helpful hints and tips that you may find useful. SEO is imperative if you want to be found online. Searching for products and services online is a regular activity by internet users – there is a high chance you found this blog or website by searching online. If you have a business and people are searching for your products or services online then SEO should be part of your internet marketing strategy.

There are two main parts of SEO, these are explained below:

There are two main elements to SEO. Offsite SEO and Onsite SEO. The search engines must be able to find and read the content on your website to understand that it is relevant to what search engine users are searching for.

Onsite SEO

We do this as standard for all of our websites. It’s all to do with the content on the website.

Content and keywords are arguably the most important aspects of SEO. If you want to be found for particular keywords or phrases on Google and the other search engines, it is important that your site contains those keywords. If it doesn’t, the search engines will not know what the website is about. This doesn’t mean that you need to add those keywords hundreds of times – this is known as keyword spamming and will ultimately have the effect of being punished by the search engines. It is more important to ensure the keywords are in the right place within the site i.e. page titles, navigation etc and are present in the correct density.

Page Titles are also 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. Headings are important too, on your website these are usually the bigger pieces of text. The content is also important, and as a general rule, the more content the better. Having content that is unique to your site is extremely important as Google penalizes sites that utilise content that is also found elsewhere on the Internet. Don’t get obsessed with writing website text for SEO alone – it’s primarily there for your site visitors and must be readable, fluent 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, it’s all about getting high quality links pointing back to your website. Quality of links to a website are much more important than the quantity. You will rarely see a website in 1st position on Google have the most number of links. Finding quality links in large numbers is the target here and will help you rank very highly. A website linking to your site is like a vote. The better the quality of votes, the better your search engine positioning. On the Internet, not all citizens are equal. Furthermore, 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 – Having a link within a site or page that is relevant to the context of your product/service is weighted highly. E.g. if you wanted to appear top of Google for phrases such as ‘Web Design York’ then having a link to your website within a review of ‘website designs in York’ would be very helpful. Having a link on a page about ‘fishing’ wouldn’t be very useful for example. E.g. web design in York would be a good link to have as the keywords are relevant and it links to your website.

Importance and page rank of the site linking to you – 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 your website has a page rank of 0 then that means it’s 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 quite costly. It’s something that you need a long term strategy for. Nobody gets to the top of google without it, but nobody gets to the top of Google instantly anyway. If anyone tells you they can get you to the top of Google without a lot of work then there’s something they’re not telling you.

Finally, 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 it wasn’t what they were 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 you rank highly!

At Snapshot Media we do onsite SEO as standard for all of our clients 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.