What Is Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is about improving the visibility of your website in the search engines and therefore increasing the quantity and quality (potential customers, rather than browsers) of your visitors.
So how does it work? Well, SEO it can be split into two sections. On page factors and off page factors. The on page factors are the ones you can directly control.
On Page SEO
These are things which you can control, things like:
Page Title
The page title is one of these most important elements on the page. Use no more than 10 words, and make sure it accurately describes the page.
Here we have done our research and chosen the words which will attract our target audience.
Domain Name
Domains which contain important keywords do particularly well in certain search engines.
If you are an Australian company make sure you use the .com.au domain. This is very important.
Use Important Keywords In Your Navigation
We will research which are the most important keywords related to your industry. Then recommend basing your information architecture on those keywords.
This makes sense for both the search engines and your customers.
The h1 Tag
This is another very important element. It is used to describe the page as well (a bit like the chapter title of a book).
It should closely resemble the page title.
Keyword Density
In our experience, worrying about things like keywords density can drastically reduce the quality the text written. Write for your customer, and not the search engine and you will get the best results for both!
All we recommend is placing the most important keywords near the top of the text.
Font Size
If you make a word bold, then you are drawing the attention of your customers to that word. Try and emphasise the most important keywords on the page but don’t emphasize the same keyword more than once.
Anchor Text
It is very important to link to pages within your site, using descriptive anchor text.
Don’t use click here! It means nothing!
There are lots of other factors to do with on page SEO, but in general: If you build your website so that your customers find it useful, and it will do well.
Off Page SEO
Having a website that brings in lots of visitors involves more than just making a great website, off page SEO factors are very important.
The most important off page factor is the number of websites that link to your website. The more links you have the more relevant your website will become and the higher you will appear in the search engine results page (SERP).
We know that this is important because it is the first thing Google tells you to do in its webmaster guidelines. It is, however, slightly more complicated than just getting links to your website.
Other off page SEO factors are for example, size of your site (the bigger the better) and how old the site it (the older the better). The most important factor is the links you have pointing to your website.
Google takes into account over 250 factors when deciding the relevance of a page and where it should appear in on the results pages.
How We Can Help Search Engine Optimise Your Site
A big part of search engine optimisation is about choosing the correct keywords to target. We can optimise your website to capture the keywords that will produce the most customers. Contact us to find out more.
