Articles & Case Studies
Welcome to the first in a series of articles on the fashionable and somewhat mystifying topic of SEO -
Search Engine Optimisation.
When prospective customers contact us to discuss our SEO services, the initial basis of the discussion is usually rooted in establishing what
they perceive SEO is, compared to what we believe.
While this is a complex topic, we believe that Search Engine Optimization consists of three
main areas:
In order to achieve the best possible results, elements of all three are required, although each produces benefits on it's own.
Lets discuss this "holy trinity" in a little bit more detail:
Of course, the place to start when working on improving the search engine rankings of a site is to ensure the technical structure of
the site, and each page within in, permits Search Engines (and their Spiders) to crawl and index the available content in it's entirety.
This means doing lots of simple things - ensuring there are no broken links, that pages link to each other (and each page is linked at least
once), and making sure the site is error free. While not strictly vital for SEO, W3C standards compliance is
a good benchmark to check sites against.
Next come some finer tuning of each page; ensuring that the title contains appropriate keywords and is relevant, that the right words are used
as link anchor text and that HTML heading tags are used suitably throughout. There are many techniques which can be applied at this stage
to squeeze the most out of the site and to coax Search Engine Spiders into indexing it precisely the way you want.
Top tip: Content is king. At the end of the day, if you have nothing to say - there is nothing for people (or spiders) to read.
Without in-bound links, your site will never be found. And it's pretty hard for search engines to find it and update their indices, too. You can
submit sitemaps and add your URL to search engines, but it's far better to become entwined in the world wide web.
Link Building involves acquiring different types of link to your site - high quality one-way backlinks, links from relevant directories (remember
that you want people to find you as well as spiders) and so forth - some people will want a reciprocal link too. This is time consuming work,
but absolutely essentially.
Top tip: Don't ask, won't get.
Thirdly, finally and often overlooked - not strictly optimising your website for search engines, but ensuring that your viewers
convert into customers - make sure that as many as possible buy your product, sign up for your newsletter or bookmark your blog.
This is a far more complex issue and many psychological factors are involved, but there are some good articles and whitepapers available on
the subject, but simple things such as high contrast elements to draw the eye to where you want it to go can make a huge difference.
Top tip: Know your customer and target your site to fulfil their needs.
What happens next?
We hope you found our brief lowdown on the nature of SEO useful, and will be publishing further articles soon. If you
would like to be notified when we release the next article, please sign up for our newsletter.
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