Posted: 11th May 2015
Search engine optimisation is a term used to describe the process of making changes to a website in order to improve its chances of being ranked in the top results of a search engine.
There is a lot of information, good and bad, available on the web about how to optimise your website for the search engines. This article seeks to cut through the jargon and give you some simple guidelines on how to start optimising your website.
There is no point getting top position on Google for a phrase that nobody is searching for. The first thing you need to do is to find out which phrases web users are actually using to search for your products or services.
We would recommend using the Google Keyword Planner to do this – you need to have a Google AdWords account in order to use this free tool, but this does not necessarily mean that you need to spend any money – create a Google AdWords account but don’t put your card details in!
Once you know the phrases that people are searching for, you also have to bear in mind how competitive they are. If you type each phrase into Google and over 1,000,000 sites come back, you have very little chance of success! The fewer competitors, the easier your job will be.
The phrases you choose also need to fit naturally into your website – there’s no point attracting people into your website only to turn them off again with the poor quality of your copy.
If your web developer has not built your website to be ‘search engine friendly’, you may never have a hope of obtaining good search engine results without using pay per click advertising.
It’s best to make sure your site is structured right in the first place, so when commissioning a new site, try to avoid:
And make sure that you list your different products or services on separate pages, rather than listing them all on one. Generally speaking, your site will perform better on search engines if you ensure each page has a tight theme rather than being on a jumble of different topics.
If you’re not sure whether your site is affected by any of these, ask your web developer or ask WiRE member Ascendancy Internet Marketing to check your site for you.
Choose which phrases to focus on, on each of your pages – only up to two or three, otherwise it will sound too repetitive. Mention those phrases a handful of times without making the text sound awkward to the reader. It’s particularly important to put your target phrases into the ‘title tag’ – the title which appears on the blue bar at the top of your browser. This phrase should really be different for each page, so make sure that your site allows you to do this.
You may have heard that it is important to put a list of your keywords into the ‘meta tags’ on your site. Don’t worry too much about this. There are two types of ‘meta tags’ that people normally talk about with regard to SEO – meta keywords and meta description. There is some value in including your keywords in the meta description, because this is often used by search engines as the ‘snippet’ that appears in the search results, so it should be a compelling description of the page to encourage people to click through. Search engines really take no notice at all of the meta keywords tag, so don’t worry about doing anything with this.
By getting a number of quality websites to link to you, as well as building a strong and trustworthy social media presence, you are demonstrating to the search engines that other site owners think that yours is a quality site – and if you can demonstrate this, you should see a boost in your search engine results.
You can start this process by making sure that, as a WiRE member, you have entered your details into the Rural Marketplace – this should give you one quality link to get you going!
Other ways of building links to your site include:
There are numerous other factors which search engines take into account – even things like how quickly your site loads, or the accuracy of your spelling and grammar. You may find that it takes time to find success in the organic search results, and you need to use pay per click advertising when your site is first launched in order to get traffic to your site quickly.
The three main factors to think about are content, structure and links. Getting all of this right is extremely time consuming, so don’t expect instant results. Don’t forget that, at the end of the day, your site needs to sell your products and services as well as attract traffic, so don’t go too far overboard with your optimisation and put your potential customers off!
This article was kindly provided by WiRE member Helen Culshaw of Ascendancy Internet Marketing. If optimising your own site seems far too daunting, contact Ascendancy on:
01952 462845
helen@ascendancyinternetmarketing.com
www.ascendancyinternetmarketing.com
Please note that this article is not written by WiRE but by a third party company. Whilst WiRE have made every effort to ensure that the information and details are accurate, we are unable to guarantee that they completely and WiRE are therefore unable to accept liability for any loss you may suffer as a result of omission or inaccuracy.
