A simple guide to SEO

Being an expert in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is very difficult claim, as the only people who know the complexity of search results is the programmers and code writers who actually work for companies such as Google.

SEO is a practice that some web developers and SEO consultants use to get a particular website or an article to the top of a search engines natural listings using a set of relevant search terms.

SEO claims and promises
Be wary of claims by web developers and consultants that guarantee high search engine rankings in a short time. A good developer should be able to optimise your business or company website so it can achieve the highest possible ranking depending on the competition within any given area. Continued work both on page (within your website) and off page (using external marketing) is key towards creating a positive impact on your websites position.

“if many competing companies are fighting for a top spot on search engine natural listings and they all follow the correct criteria to achieve a good front page ranking who determines the final position?

If you’re having trouble finding yourself on a search engines natural listings or your position is past page 2 or 3 then you can employ some simple SEO tricks to increase your ranking and improve your natural position with the search engine results.

We’ve created a simple guide bellow to get you started in SEO to optimise your site and help you achieve better natural listings and positioning in search engine results.

Key Words.

Potential customers or clients tend to ask search engines a question, or typically type in a few key words, depending on what they are seeking out. If you are writing content for your website or article think about what people will type into a search box relating to your products or service. Write good clear and precise content for your website. This will help you tremendously and will help clients or customers find you.

The Title.

Each web page has a title attached to the HTML code. Search engines seek out this title as its deemed very important. If say for example you have a company that sells

Web design services in Northampton

Then you might want to think about having a title that reads just that. (Web design in Northampton) What your actually doing here is optimising your page so search engines find your company. Sometimes its best to think about how people will try and search you out on a particular search engine.

Heading Tags.

When you are writing content for a website you might want to think about sub headings. To web developer these are called H1 and H2 tags. H1 and H2 are the most important of all heading tags when it comes to SEO. Lets go back to the web design company again. Try and use the H1 tag as your main title tag. So it could be wise to mention in your first H1 that you are a web design business called? And you are based in Northampton for example. You can then use the H2 tag to determine other information such as what you specialise in, this could be, graphics, animation, 3D, SEO, hand coded websites.

What your actually doing here is listing possible key words a potential customer may type into a search engine to retrieve your company for new business. It might be wise to use these tags in relation to your company business profile throughout each page within the construction of your website.

Page name.

Many web developers name the pages by the purpose of what they are supposed to do for example:
home.html or services.php

Search engines list page names highly within the matrix of SEO. The page name will appear in the address bar within a browser so search engines pick this up and it can hold great significance.

A good web developer can name pages like this: web_design_northampton_about.html
This will optimize each page and increase search listing on a particular website.

Name of site.

It might be worth thinking over the name of your company before you launch it on the internet. You will be more likely to be listed higher if you name the company like this: (www.WebDesignNorthampton.com)

Once again because the name of your company is the actual key words that will be searched, the positioning of the search ranking will be increased,

Content is king.

While writing your paragraphed content you might want to throw in a few key words again, like the name of your company and location. List your most popular services or products and try and make the content sound fairly interesting. Don’t try and add too many key words otherwise not only will your copy sound slightly strange it can actually be penalised by search engines for a term called Keyword stuffing.

Meta tags and descriptions – Keywords.

A lot of what a customer or client sees once the site is complete is a totally different version to what a developer sees. Next time you click on a site, right click on the screen with your mouse button. You will now see a panel with (view source code). What you will see here is code wrapped in text. This is what a developer has to work with.

A web developer or SEO consultant will add Meta tags towards the top of the site content. This will include a company description, key words and author. Always check these once your site is complete. Your web developer should add these in automatically.

Adding links to other sites.

Once your site is live and your happy with the way it looks and feels its now the time to drive traffic to it. These can be links that you can place on other sites that are relevant to your content. You can create networking sites with Facebook and Twitter or other social networking sites that you can add and build profiles. Potential customers may find your website by clicking on a relevant link you have created.

Be very careful with adding or posting links. If you tend to do this too often and without permission on other websites, forums, networking sites or relevant articles, your links may be deleted. This is known as spamming.

The more relevant links you have pointing towards your website. The higher your ranking becomes in search engine listings.

Its all about the Blog.

Blogs have become a very powerful tool within the dynamics of web development. SorbetMedia always recommend a blog feature depending on the type of company project we are working on. The benefits are massive so let us explain.

Lets say for example you own a web design consultancy and already have a website with a Blog, News or latest Events feature. All you need to do now is start writing relevant information using all the criteria you have just read above. You can write about anything relevant to your company that you think customers or new clients would type in when using search engines. As you can see from this blog, SorbetMedia is writing a relevant web article about SEO (search engine optimisation). We are targeting potential business in Northampton that may need help with SEO or potentially a new Website. If a particular reader clicks on our company website they can also review all the other services we have to offer. This is the power of a Blog. Search engines will list blogs and news articles relating to all the information we have suggested above.

Search engine submission.

Once your site has gone live it might be a good idea to actually submit your site to each search engine. Lets say you want to appear in the Google listings. Type into the Google search box (website submissions) and follow the correct process to submit your site. Your web site will automatically be crawled by each search engine but it might be wise to submit it anyway.

Time

When we mention time, what we really mean is patience. If you follow the key benefits of SEO and can drive plenty of traffic to your website, then this will definitely help with your position in search engines. The longer your company stays live on the internet the more presence you generate for your website ranking. More Traffic = Better Position.

Don’t take our word for it.

SorbetMedia don’t claim to be SEO experts but we have designed and built enough websites to understand the principles and techniques of good SEO practice. If you don’t believe us or want to read more check out what Google have to say about it. Otherwise call us if you have any further questions.