What is Search Engine Optimisation ?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. By getting the SEO right for your website you can ensure the best possible ranking with search engines such as Google. The better your ranking, the higher up the search results you are.
Search engines are in competition with each other so they don’t want to show a website that’s 2 years out of date. or one that has lots of broken links because it will damage their business. Companies such as Google invest a lot of their time and money into finding sites that are relevant to people’s searches. They do this by using a piece of programming called an algorithm. This helps inform them as to which sites are regularly updated and that work well. These sites will get a better ranking than poorly built and maintained sites.
The only way to get your site higher in the rankings, or on Page 1 of a set of specific search results, is to follow the best practice that Google and other companies are looking for with their algorithms.
You can pay to advertise on Google (using Google Ads) and ensure you are seen when people search for certain key words. The downside is that there can be a drop off of page ranking when you stop advertising, particularly if your website has some design and build flaws. You need to keep a close eye on how much an advertising campaign is costing you as it can build up very quickly.
Good quality SEO can take a while to build up, which is where a Google Ad may be helpful when the site is first launched. There are no “quick fixes”, just a lot of sustained effort.
SEO myths:
- You cannot get high up in Google or on the first page in less than a few months
- You can’t buy a higher ranking for natural page results.
(Google Ads is temporary) - Submitting to lots of search engines won’t improve your ranking. You only need submit to the few that are widely used.
- Submitting to Google lots of times will do more harm than good. They are aware that people will try and manipulate their system so this type of behaviour will just get your rank downgraded.
We talk about Google because it is the number one search engine people use. It’s not the only one, but if you’re meeting Google’s requirements then you’re meeting what the rest want too.
So what are the key criteria?
Google looks for certain quality criteria in your website. If your site ticks most of these boxes, it will steadily climb up the rankings.
- Relevance of the subject of your site to the search by the user
- Is the site is well built or has design flaws
- Do other sites link to yours?
- How fast does your site download? (more important than many people realise)
- Use text rather than graphics and images to explain content
- Make your content text relevant to your website subject
- Make your site suitable for all browsers, including those on mobile devices.
- Make your content information rich
What can you do to improve your SEO?
- Have a well coded website. Apart from the fact your site will function far better, you won’t get penalised by Google and lose any ranking.
- Make sure your content is well written and relevant to what you do. Using words that people will search for in your text (keywords) is a good idea – just don’t overdo it. (That gets penalised too!)
- Make sure your website loads quickly. Good coding and compressed images are a key part of this, but where you host your website plays a large part too You can test the speed of your website here: http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/
- Have good quality links. If your site is good, other sites will link to it. Google will recognise this and allocate ranking accordingly. A note of caution here! Genuine links are really good news, reciprocated links (where you and a friend link to each other) less so. There are some sites that are “blacklisted” by Google and you should avoid linking to your site from them as it will penalise your page ranking.
- Use social media. Plaforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and business blogs can provide inbound links to your site that are relevant and good quality.
- Don’t pay to submit your site to a search engine. Start with Google, Yahoo and Bing.
- If you have the techie know-how then check your metadata in your website coding. It should be all about your business, not the web designers that made your site…
SEO has been built up, by some, to be a “dark art”. However, the underlying principles are actually very straightforward. If you’d like more advice from Red Box on how to optimise your SEO and talk about how we can help you then please get in touch or pop in to our office in Stafford.