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The Basics of Search Engine Optimisation

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Search Engine Optimisation

Relevant, targeted keywords are the essential ingredient in getting your website closer to the top of the search engine rankings and will help you to attract more targeted visitors who are interested in your website's content and products. When your customers enter keywords in a search engine, do they find your website or the site of your competitors?

Selecting the right keywords is the single most important part of search engine optimisation

Use a website designer who has the right tools and can give you cold hard facts about the popularity of specific keywords and phrases. Do you know how many people typed in “Left Handed Spanners” into google last month?

Start with the Basics

If you don't do the fundamentals correctly, advanced tricks won't help you much. We will make sure that the keywords you've selected are used in the strategic places where search engines look throughout your website.

Page Titles, Meta Tags, Image Tags, Page Headings, Body Text, Hyperlinks and Page Textual Content

Content is King

The more content you have the better. Think about it. You've got to prove that your website is the best for the phrases you've chosen and you can't do that on a two page website. You need to demonstrate that you are the best at what you do. You need to have engaging content on your website and lots of it.

Most information on the internet is effectively free, I mean you're not charging people to read your website are you. So if someone has a choice about whether to read a two page website or your much larger website to seek the information they want, which site do you think that they will choose. Search engines are no different. They like to see lots and lots of content talking about a particular subject. They rightly think that a larger website is probably better than a smaller one.

Any Ideas?

Building content is a superb way to help the search engines like you, especially when you use all of your key phrases. Write articles on your website, add news often about your company and business sector. Add extra pages about your services. Add new products and services. Explain more about the benefits of what you can do for your customers. Add testimonials, case studies and stories about your customers.

There are lots of ways to write more content for your website. Just remember to do it and do it often. Search engines know when you've updated your website and will check back often to see what you've been up to.

Assess Your Keywords

You may have quite a few keywords and keyword phrases that succinctly describe your product or service. You need to research how effective each keyword and phrase is by answering 2 questions:

  1. How many other websites use the same keywords?
  2. How many people actually search on those keywords?

Clarke Design can access the most popular search engine results for you to let you know how many people (usually over the past month) have entered a particular keyword or phrase and can also advice on alternative phrases.

Get Yourself Linked

Link Popularity is the number of web pages that link to a specific website. This is now a critically important factor in driving traffic to that website.

New sites and sites with low link popularity are at a major disadvantage and may find it very hard to attract new visitors via search engines. Increase your links and you should increase traffic.

Google states “The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the web, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly .”

Once is Never Enough

Search engines index new websites every day and you have to work hard to stand out in the crowd. Be prepared to modify your keywords as your site and competition changes.

Keyword selection is a delicate balancing act that begins during site design and continues for as long as your website is live (or for as long as you want people to find it!)