SEO Advice and Tips
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation. The process of getting as many high quality visitors to your website from search engines as possible.
Why should I find out more about SEO?
Because the internet plays an ever increasing role in most companies branding. Your online presence gives you the opportunity to market your business to a vast potential market, as well as connect with your existing clients.
Which domain name should I choose?
Your company name is the obvious choice, but also consider your area of business. Domain names feature highly in searches for keywords and phrases. For example, if your company is called Joe Bloggs Ltd but specialises in selling toasters, a domain name of www.toasters…. would probably be more beneficial to search engine rankings than www.joebloggsltd….
Why is my new Website not appearing in Google Search Results?
Many businesses are surprised when their brand new sparkly website, with a new domain name is not displayed in Google or other search engines after you have gone ‘live’, this is because the search engines do not know it exists! In order to get past the first SEO hurdle you need to let them know that your new website exists.
There are a number of ways to do this, go to: http://www.google.com/submityourcontent, sign up for webmaster tools and add your URL, submit a sitemap and do the same for other search engines such as Bing.
Even with this in place it can take some time for your site to appear in search engines. One of the fastest ways I have found to get your new website noticed, is to ensure you have some links on the internet that point to your new site. The higher the page rank and more relevant the website is to your content, the better. A word of caution on links though, as the unscrupulous SEO tactics of old mean that it is no longer beneficial to generate thousands of random inbound links to your website. The key to this, along with many SEO methods, is to remember that quality and quantity together is of key importance.
Even better than a simple link are articles with relevant content and a link to your site. As well as getting your site noticed, this begins the process of optimising your website.
So how can I Increase Visitors to my site?
Getting a large number of visitors to your site is great news, but the important thing is to consider who you want to visit and targeting them. The number of page views or hits are somewhat irrelevant if none of these visitors are interested in the services or products your business is offering.
The bad news is that there are no magic one-step solutions to SEO success, and anyone who tells you there are is misleading you. The methods used to maximise your online presence vary from business to business and it is an on-going task in a constantly changing environment. There is no easy way of getting to the top of search engine results, and what works for a certain time may not work six months down the line. It isn’t simply a question of optimising your new site and then forgetting about SEO.
Your SEO work should begin at the planning stage of your website and is all too often forgotten in the process of developing a website; make sure you work with your website developer and ask them what they plan to do to maximise the effectiveness of your online presence as part of the website design. Identify your target audience, keywords, tags and plan page titles appropriately. Always design your website for ‘real people’ but consider the search engine robots as well. Check that your websites code is as clean as possible, a useful way to check is to visit http://validator.w3.org/ and enter your website address.
Get social. Use social media to your advantage, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Google+ and RSS feeds all offer excellent free ways of promoting your business and increasing your online presence, but don’t use them to generate spam; instead focus on engaging with your audience. If appropriate, use newer mediums such as video and viral marketing and consider if a website optimised for smart phones or tablets is needed. If you are a retail business consider using discount codes and cashback schemes such as Quidco to raise your profile, online forums are a great place for the shopaholic to share these offers and it can help improve your online branding.
Content is King. This is simple, but probably the most important point here, websites with regularly updated, high quality, unique content will benefit in search engine rankings.
Online Directories can be helpful to a certain extent, for example, if you already have an entry for your company on a directory make sure you add a link to your website if possible. If you are primarily targeting a local area there are often a number of local business associations and directories you can add your website to.
Research your online market and adapt. Study your website statistics and your website entries in search engines, use tools such as http://marketing.grader.com/ and Google Webmaster Tools to give you an idea if you are heading in the right direction, and what tactics are working or not.
We are updating our website with a new design, what do we need to consider?
As well as the points above look at your current setup and plan what you want to achieve, consider the SEO already in place. For example, if you have high ranking pages already indexed in search engines and these page URLs are changed in the new design, make sure to ask your website developer to setup 301 redirects so the search engines know where to find the new pages. If you are considering changing your domain name bear in mind that you will essentially need to start from scratch with your SEO work.
Is it worth the hard work and effort?
You may be like us, and generate a lot of new business through traditional word-of-mouth recommendations, or your tried and tested marketing methods, but the internet is a powerful medium to generate new leads, connect with your audience and raise the profile of your brand; be assured that even if you don’t consider SEO to be important your key competitors will, and they will be looking to increase their online presence as you sink down the rankings.