One of the most important things your website needs is a good relationship with search engines. Not only will this bring more enquiries to your website, but will ensure that visitors and potential customers always have a way of finding you on the web.
The important thing to remember is that optimising your website for search engines isn't as difficult as it might seem. A combination of our step by step guide and your hard work will make sure that you're always found.
As you may already know we have a fantastic
SEO Guide
which can show you how to optimise your website.
SEO Beginners
Implement analytics solution
Google Analytics
is a free solution, and will allow you to analyse future visitor stats and performance in search engines.
Search engines have inbuilt spell checkers, and will penalise any website which contains a large number of misspelt words.
Having a focus for your website will massively improve your results on search engines. It also allows you to specifically market your website to be found for particular search terms.
Depending on whether you want local business, national business, or international business, you'll need to add or modify the location data on your website. Adding town or city names as additional keywords is a great way to improve your local results.
Enter your chosen set of keywords into the search engines page in The Toolkit. Also create an optimised website description of no more than 155 characters, which encompasses at least two keywords, and one location.
Search engines love links, and in contrast, they will penalise your website heavily for any broken links. A broken link is one which doesn't reach its intended target, and it's worth checking these regularly (especially any links to other websites, as these are out of your control).
SEO Intermediate
Set up a Facebook account
and link it from your website. This is similar to a personal account, as your business or organisation will collect likes and can be shared across your customers personal accounts. This is a great way to attract more visitors and reach your customers friends via a word of mouth type of recommendation
Create a Twitter account
for your Business. This is similar to a personal account as your business or organisation will collect followers depending on the amount you tweet and the interest those tweets have to the general public. Once you have a decent level of followers you can post information and links back to your website to increase traffic.
In a similar way to the website meta data, enter a set of keywords, and a unique description into each page in the website. This may also include image folders, and page folders for extra results. Remember that no description should be more than 155 characters.
Each page requires one title, and preferable a number of sub heading to separate each section. This can be achieved with a number of different tags, which can be styled to give different effects.
Each page on your website requires a unique name, and these need to be as short and punchy as possible as search engines prefer shorter links. You will also need to use all lower case lettering, and use hyphens to separate words if required.
XML sitemap and Webmaster Tools
These tools will significantly shorten the response time from search engines. As standard, search engines will visit your website to check for new information every 4-6 weeks. An
XML sitemap
used with
Webmaster Tools
will allow your website to communicate directly with search engines, and significantly reduce the waiting time for updates to your listing.
SEO Advanced
A blog is arguably the most powerful form of social networking available for SEO purposes. You have an almost endless amount of space to fill with regular updates, news, images and videos, which will all add to your content profile. For an on-the-domain blog, see our
blog service
.
Search engines love links. By linking your chosen keywords in your website text to relevant pages on your website, you create a spider's web of links, which will give you a big boost in search results. Try not to do this more than once or twice per paragraph of text, as this can put visitors off.
In a similar way to internal links, search engines like to see links to other websites, that can be followed back to your own. Professional bodies, trade unions, directory listings and partner companies are a good place to start. Make sure to link to pages that have a direct link back to your own site.
As search engines have no ability to understand images on a website, you need to provide a line of alternative text for each one. These are invisible to visitors, and so can be a great way of providing extra uses of your keywords. Don't forget to create tags for your images within galleries, as well as your company logo and individual slides within an animated header.
Create optimisedwebsite title
Each page of your website will contain the website name within its title. Using your company name and a keyword or two will mean further exposure for your chosen search terms. Remember that no page title (website title + page title) should be more than 70 characters.
Run an SEO checker-report
An SEO report can help to ensure that you've done everything correctly, as some issues aren't totally apparent to the naked eye. There are plenty of SEO Reports online; find the one that best suits your business and use the tool to run a report.
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