The tricky question of SEO – exactly what is Search Engine Optimisation?…

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO seems to be one of those areas web designers bang on about, business owners feel they should know about, and the main focus is on page 1 of Google search engine results. 

 

Well here I hope to clear up what it is without banging on too much, or getting too dry and technical. 

 

Firstly SEO is not just one fixed thing.  The Search Engines regularly modify how they rank pages, the way the population uses the internet changes and your business changes too.  SEO is an ongoing process, and it’s easier to think of it on a spectrum rather than 1 thing.  Keep in the forefront of your mind that no matter how they tweak and change their systems Google (et al) are looking to put at the top of the search engine results  high quality websites that are relevant to the search term someone has searched.  The more accurately and quickly they get someone to the site they are looking for, the more popular they become as a search engine, and in-turn the more money they can make from advertising.  As a website owner the overall aim of your SEO is to rank as highly as possible in the search engines for relevant searched words.  The first 2 pages of Google being the best place to be.  Any SEO from whoever provides it carries no guaranteed results, but you should see positive change over weeks and months.

 

As it is a spectrum, as we see it, there are some basics to get in place on the site itself, often known as on-site SEO.  As we see these as foundations for your site, if we design and build your site from scratch you always get this included. And better still, good SEO practise, is also good web design practise that has other benefits to your website and business too.

 

On-site SEO

• Website build, the website needs to be built correctly to a professional standard (sounds obvious but it’s amazing how many websites fall down on this basic point.)
• Keyword research, to establish what your target market may be typing into search engines to find your products and services.  This also establishes which words are searched most often and how competitive they are.
• Techy stuff – code – a web designer/developer can add in parts of the code of your site to name, describe the pages of your site, add text notes to images, and show the search engines which information is most important on the site.  This all helps the search engines to show your site for relevant searches. 
• Text content  – The keywords you want to rank well for need to be included in the site, so make sure they are, but always make sure you (or whoever is writing your copy) writes for people to read it not for the search engine robots.  Stuffing you site with keywords, where it’s not helpful to the reader is bad practise and can actually cause your site to be penalised.
• Adding the site to the search engines – we submit your site to the search engines, which just helps the find and ‘crawl’ your site quicker.
• A technical site map – this is not the visual ones you often see on website, but technical hidden maps that again help Google (et al) see all the pages of your site and how they link together.
• An up-to-date site  – search engines don’t want to rank site’s highly that give out-of-date information, so a regularly updated site with regularly blog posts, news posts or pages is see more positively in the eyes of the search engines.
• A rich resource  – as they are looking for sites that have relevant information, a rich site, full of information, in multiple formats, such as text, images, video, maps, links etc will again, be seen more positively.

 

So once your web developer has put the basics in place, if you are managing the content on the site, it’s worth for SEO  and for business in general to keep your site up-to-date, and rich.  See our other blog posts Good website housekeeping and Blogging for business – the tricky question of what to write about for help in these areas.

 

Beyond your site there are further things that can be done to optimise your site for the search engines.  This is often referred to as off-site SEO.

 

Off-site SEO includes a variety of things including people linking to your site (which in lots of cases  Google sees as a vote of confidence in your website’s content) Your social media activity and your mentions on social media are also taken into account here.  These are important and can be developed alongside your other marketing yourself,  as with most things, you can pay companies to do this on your behalf if you prefer, but beware of some companies who can simply buy or rent links to your site, so as soon as you stop paying them your monthly fee, your ranking will drop through the floor, If you are paying someone to do your SEO each month just ask them what they are doing to achieve the results.

 

 If you would like help with your search engine optimisation, we offer on-site work basics , contact us for a quote.  Or for more information on SEO please feel free to email me amy@twizzlebird.co.uk