SEO - Search Engine Optimisation
What is SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of getting results from a search engine showing your business in the list of responses.
For Example using Google Chrome browser search for, ‘washing machines’ press return and your search string is matched with the list on Google’s index servers. Then a list of results is returned and displayed on your screen, you then sift through the results to find an option you like the look of.
In order to get your business in the returned list your website must be compliant with the rules of SEO. This means that your website needs to be indexed by Google and other search engines so when a potential customer looks up a product you sell then your website arrives in the list.
Overall it is quite simple your website has “washing machines” listed on the web page allowing Google to show your product when a search is carried out. the reality is not quite so simple but in broad brush strokes that is how it works.
Website
Once the website has been created then the target audience need to be assessed. Understand the target audience is one one of the most important parts of making a business work and it doesn’t change with a website. The difference between “we sell washing machines” and “We sell guaranteed washing machines” could make all the difference.
Keywords
The words used in the headings, meta data and text are investigated by Google BOTs so having a good selection of keywords that can be discovered by search engines is very important. Researching keyword, If the product is “Washing Machines” then keywords could be “washing machines in (location)” or “brand name washing machines” or “washing machines sold near my location”.
There is no guarantee that optimising your website for organic SEO will bring customers to your website alone. Try typing in a search term as if you were a customer looking for your products, then see how many results are returned, I just tried searching for “washing machines” and got 283 million results. I tried again and this time added my nearest town to the search
Organic SEO
Organic ‘Search engine optimisation’ is a means of showing your website pages to search engines so they are understood.
The website pages can be adjusted to optimise search engines view of them getting the best from searches results. Using Google Analytics and Bing/Yahoo Webmaster tools can help to analyse results and understand how to focus page content.
The results of analytics show the strengths and weaknesses of site pages.
Help - How to
We make every effort to make websites as friendly as possible to search engines so Google, Bing and other search engines will see and understand your site content.
The pages on your site need to describe your business, products and services so the pages can be translated by search engines. We start with four basic pages, Home –
This is a recommended practise for website pages and although its not essential to have words on each page to the recommended word count it is the basis for search engines to take an interest in your web pages for organic development.
If the business is selling catering services then it must be clear to the search engine what the services are and when they are available, then when a search engine receives a request for catering services in the area where the business is registered/works the results will show the websites available in the search area.
If you have any questions and your unable to find the answers here then drop us an email via the Contact Us form.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Behind the scenes your web site will need all the relevant coding, title tags, ALT tags, meta descriptions.
The pictures on your website pages need to be understood by a BOT ( short for robot) an Internet robot. The BOTs that serf the Internet web pages are going to inspect the page content of your website.
If your website doesn’t have the required structure in place it may not be indexed correctly or at all and therefore have no ranking. The text on website pages also needs to be compliant with the flesch reading ease test. Once the page is compliant and has a tile tag that is about 50 characters long and a meta description that is about 150 characters long, the pictures have a descriptive title rather than img-123.jpg => washing-machine.jpg with an ALT tag “Washing Machine with dryer”. This information can be read by the BOT and will make sense for it to index the page.
Key words need to be included in your text, sub headings and titles describing your business.
When a BOT, robot crawls your site, it will look at the visible text, links, tags etc. and from that will index the findings into its database. When your customers search the Internet the Search Engine will place your web site into those searches.
Help - TIPs on how to Improve SEO
- Think about what your customers might type in to search for your page
- Use those phrases in your headings and content
- Add links to take your customers to other pages within your site. This encourages the Search Engines to crawl through those pages
- Ensure your pictures have relevant descriptions
- Try content ideas and request Google to re-index the pages changes using Search Console.
- Analyse the page views in Google Analytics to judge if the content needs to change
- Add customer reviews to improve confidence in you products
SEO More Detail
What is SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. This is a series of rules that can be interpreted by search engines. The BOT’s (robots) that look at a webpage can’t see visual versions of the page they look at the page content by reading the electronic information that forms the visual version we see.
If you would like to see this in detail then using Chrome right click on your webpage or any webpage and select view page source, this will display a new tab with the coding that makes up the page. It will not make much sense unless you are familiar with HTML, try a ctrl-f to do a screen find and enter <h1, this relates to a heading 1 and is the most important heading on the page. There should be two H1 heading tags in the search, the first at the beginning of the heading and the other at the end. It should look similar to <h1>Photography</h1>
H1 – Heading
The H1 heading forms part of the overall site structure as each page requires one H1 heading, one H2 heading, many H3 headings. If needed H4-H6 headings can be used remembering that H6 headings have the least hierarchical position of all the headings.
Once the page has met the criteria it’s ready to be indexed by Google or Bing search engines. This structure can be read and understood by Internet BOTs and will enable the page to be indexed.
Oh i didn’t mention an item about text other than being flesch compliant, it needs to be 300 words long or longer to gain value with a BOT. We suggest that key pages are compliant but not necessary for all pages. If you have a page with the business opening hours and supplementary text about weekends or bank holidays etc then we feel it would be over the top to expect the page content to match 300 plus words.
We offer to create a website with basic search engine compliance including registration with Google, Bing and Yahoo. We will make sure that each page has a page title, meta description, H1 tag and depending on the page content will add H2 and H3 tags as needed.
SEO is a specialist subject and there are many specialists who have trained specifically in SEO techniques and how to get the most from connecting your website to your customers and potential customers. Its not an exact science as the search engines change and tweak the algorithms used to index websites.
There are two ways to gain visitors to a website, the first uses a technique called organic search engine optimisation or external marketing and other selling methods PPC (Pay Per CLick).
Business Advertising
Businesses need to advertise there products and services and this can be achieved in many different mediums these days from news paper advertising, flyers to calling potential customers on the telephone or using the many of the available social networking products like Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging of many different flavours including WordPress.
Optimising a website is essential to get good organic ratings with search engines, its also a good idea to develop a strategy that includes other methods of marketing your products/services. There are many different means of getting attention to your website in addition to organic SEO development, PPC (Pay Per Click) talking about your website face to face, sending out web and email addresses on business cards, compliment slips and flyers included with purchased items in the box, just to say thank you and remember who we are.
Search engines use bots (robots) to investigate web pages and currently are unable to interpret images so its important that all images have “alt txt” entries identifying the image with a meaningful title as explained above. All other elements of a web page need to be identified so bots can easily understand how the pages are made up. Web page readers are also a feature to accommodate when considering how to describe content names and alt txt description, not only important for search engine BOTs but also for visually impaired and colour blind visitors, Google like a friendly approach.
Example - Product Selling
For example, a business resells car shampoo and you believe its the best available so the most relevant keywords will be car and shampoo then adding further definitions to build a list. Its worth discovering how Google ranks a particular keyword so the page looks good and informative and Google will rank your page well because you have used good quality keywords.
There are many more areas worth complying with to benefit from organic growth getting the website listed for potential customers to find.
This is a recommended practise for website pages and although its not essential to have all the words and images on each page it is the basis for search engines to take an interest in your website for organic development.
If the business is selling catering services then it must be clear to the search engine what the services are and when they are available, then when a search engine receives a request for catering services in the area where the business is registered/works the results will show the websites available in the search area.
If you have any questions and your unable to find the answers here then drop us an email via the Contact Us form.
It might all sound very complicated but taking things one step at a time then the basics are fairly straight forward.
Organic S.E.O
Organic SEO is a method used to explain a website to a search engine.
The two sides to the equation are human users and computerised search engines. We use text, photographs, pictures, diagrams to express our business products and services. We look at pages visually when searching for something we want to find out about.
If for example we were looking for a washing machine we would use Google or one of the many search engines and type in “washing machine” press return to see what Google lists as options for me to discover more about washing machines. I can then click an item on the returned list from Google and determine if that is the one I am looking for.
Then when looking at the list on the page I select the first option to see if it show me the information I am looking for. The results show information about washing machines so the search engine has guessed that is what I am looking to purchase a new washing machine. I then find the washing machine I am looking for after selecting the option from the list.
The websites listed are a combination of advertised websites that have a small ‘Ad’ at the beginning of the site title followed by organically optimised websites that are selling washing machines and then more at the bottom of the page by more adverts. Many websites offer help and tutorials online to create and implement compliant pages have a look at MOZ there is plenty of help here.
Also consider allowing Google to know your location.
Page Ranking
The question is how do you get your website on that first page or second page? There are ways to get you web page to display using organic optimisation that require making the site pages work using best practises. There are also other ways to get your site at the top of the list using Google AdWords advertising campaign. Also consider how competitive your business is in your catchment area, if you have 20 businesses in a location supporting a small population it will be harder to complete for orders.
Scalable, meaning compatible with desktops, tablets and smart phones. The information here is basic and once installed and setup you will find Google will alter there algorithms as they do from time to time, but this is all part of the fun. It is a bit like painting the forth bridge once you finish you have to go back to the beginning and start again, yes its a big bridge.