Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as it is often called is not some kind of black art! It’s a simple of logic of improving your chances of getting the search engines such as Google, Bing and others to bring relevant visitors and potential customers to your website….for FREE.

In order to do this we need to work on your website and internet footprint to ensure that you rank highly for those “search terms” that potential customers are typing into their browsers when looking for something.

Sounds simple! But the catch is that the search engines take a lot of things into consideration when they rank your website against all the others out there. There are two main areas to work on.

Relevance

You have total control of this! Basically is the content of your web pages relevant to what people are actually looking for? This goes deeper than you can see on the screen and is influenced by:

• Security Certificate (https://)
• Domain name
• URL structure
• Headings
• Page Metadata (the labels you cannot see)
• Content (relevant keywords required and not too spammy)
• Image labelling
• Grammar & Spelling
• Readability
• Hyperlinks within content
• Speed of website loading

Credibility

Anyone can create the perfect web page, so the search engines look for something more, its kind of a trustworthy score created from a combination of things such as:

• Relevance – you need to get the basics right from the list above.
• Age of website
• Visitor behaviour – do people bounce of your site or do they explore it?
• Growth – do the search engines see your site being updated and growing over time?
• Inbound links – see below

The longer a business exists that delivers good service then it is inevitable that other businesses will mention or even recommend that service by way of a referring link from their own websites or on social media posts. It may be a click here, or view site, or read more probably your domain or business name but sometimes they may just give you a boost by describing you as “the best pizza restaurant in town”, throwing you some relevance and credibility all in one link.

When a website throws you an “inbound link” it passes a little credibility downstream to you, which is great if that website has a high credibility score such as council website, a university or government site which has been online since the dawn of the internet.

You can see credibility takes time and effort and that today is the catch! If you cannot crack this then your alternatives are to keep trying and to pay for those adverts on the search engines!!