search engine optimisation (SEO)

search engine optimisation – what is seo?

search engine optimisation is the process of analysing each page on your website to determine the primary focus. Once we have determined the primary focus of each page we will work with you to optimise the content so your page will show up in Google for a number of key phrases. There are over 200 factors that are used to determine a pages performance in the Google rankings. Most business websites these days try to show all of their services on the front page. This kind of approach might seem enticing to the business owner, however this approach hinders a sites performance in Google. Google essentially blind so it cannot see the images on your page and will only read the text on your page. If you page talks about 6 different services on the one page then Google isn’t able to determine the main focus of the page. If you only talk about one service on each page then Google will understand the relevance of the page. There are both on-site and off-site techniques that need to be used for effective SEO.

on-site search engine optimisation

on-site search engine optimisation takes into account all of the elements on each page that can be altered to optimise your code and content so that each page on your site is performing at it’s peak level in terms of search engine optimisation. Some of the on-site search engine optimisation factors include the following:

• Keyword density
• Effective use of HTML tags (Titles tags, heading tags, strong tags, anchor links and image alt tags…just to name a few!)
• Consistent content updates (Google loves fresh content. Add new pages to your site so that Google reads something new every few weeks. You will out perform your competitors)
• Making sure you have a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml file to help search engines crawl your content. (This is geek speak but it’s important for us to do this for you!)
• Optimising internal links
• Adding “nofollow” tags to outbound links
• Keyword research (find out what users are actually searching for and change your content to capture their searches and give them what they are searching for!)

off-site search engine optimisation

off-site search engine optimisation refers to any of the elements on external websites that can influence links and traffic to your website. Some of the off-site search engine optimisation factors include the following:

• PageRank (Google’s measure of importance of your website based on traffic and the number of backlinks to your site)
• Back links (The number of sites who are linking back to your site. N.B. Their sites should be relevant to your products and/or services)
• Press releases and articles on external networks
• Google Local listings
• Listings in directories such as DMOZ
• Viral marketing strategies (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter)