There are various ways to get visitors to your site but the most straightforward for the visitor is to find you in a search engine and for most people this means Google. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the phrase used to describe the various ways a website can be tailored to make it more attractive to search engines. In general, these are relatively straightforward and common sense plays a large part.
There are many myths surrounding SEO but the reality is that for most sites good results can be obtained by the site owner understanding some simple facts about how search engines rank pages. For sites where business survival depends on high page listings in a competitive arena then using an expert will be a sound investment.
All of our websites are delivered with SEO tools built in to allow you to manage the level of SEO that you need. If you want to manage your SEO yourself we can offer you advice and help to make sure you stay on top of the task. Even if you need to use an external expert the tools and built in facilities will offer them the mechanisms they need to get your listings higher without the need to change or modify the structure of your site.
SEO Overview
Google and other search engines place the pages they consider to have the best content at the top of the page. The basic things to consider are:
- The content in the page should be useful and appropriate. The search engines are good at spotting text that is 'stuffed' with keywords and phrases.
- The page should be structured, have a proper heading and be well organised.
- The page should have what is called meta data, a title, keywords and a description. These are not immediately visible but are used to produce the listing shown in the search engine.
- Have a good descriptive URL rather than a jumble of letters and numbers.
- Be linked to from other pages within your site and from external websites.
- Provide a site map.
The items above are in general easy to do and keep on top of. In addition, it is useful to create new content and inform the search engines of the new content. In the regard many sites now contain a blog (news) as this is a good way to generate new content and also offers ways to provide links to other parts of the site.
Further reading
There are many articles available online relating to ways a site owner can carry out their own SEO and the articles section of this site lists some that we think are very informative.
