Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of maximising the number and quality of visitors to your website from search engines. This usually means getting your website ranked as high as possible in search results, increasing the likelihood of people clicking on the link and boosting the number of visitors to your website.

It’s a vast subject but here’s a list of some of the essential points to consider:

Title tags of your web page – This is the page title that appears at the top of your browser page. It’s important that these accurately describe the content of a page and match what people are typing into search engines. If your website is static HTML then editing the title tag is relatively straightforward. If you use a content management system or e-commerce then it’s important that your system can automatically add title tags as it encourages search engines to index individual pages.

Keywords – This is the visible text on your website page. While it should be written to read well, it should also contain keywords that are being typed into search engines.

Meta tags – These are unseen sections of a web page that can contain keywords and a description. Search Engines still index these but they have been downgraded in importance as certain unscrupulous website owners were caught trying to fool search engines into featuring their pages by adding popular but irrelevant keywords.

Backwards links – All major search engines regard the number and quality of websites linking to your website as an indication of quality. It implies that web users find the website useful and relevant to its particular subject area and this helps a search engine decide whether a web page is relevant to a particular keyword.

Page rank – This is a rating that Google gives to all websites to indicate overall quality. While the factors controlling Page Rank are kept secret, it is no surprise that high quality, popular and frequently changed websites such as the BBC and Amazon have page ranks of 9/10.

Click on the image to view Google’s excellent guide to search engine optimisation

Here are some of the main steps in Search Engine Optimisation:

1.    Keyword research – use free and subscription tools such as word tracker to discover what people are actually typing into search engines and what alternatives might exist.
2.    Make technical and text changes to your website based results of keyword research.

3.    Seek links back to your website (backwards links) from other websites, business directories, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Web forums etc.

4.    Submit XML sitemap and validate your website to the main search engines.

Please contact us for how we can help improve your website traffic by search engine optimisation.