Search Engine Optimisation
(SEO) boosts your ranking on Popular Search Engines.
Search engine optimisation is the process of making sure that your
website performs well on search engines by boosting your organic
ranking on popular search engines securing a better position than
your competitors’ websites. The process of SEO must be
constantly monitored and re-adjusted to suit your website’s changing
SEO needs. Part of this process is monitoring your web
statistics and lead performance of your website.
There are two
key factors to remember for SEO, namely on-page
optimisation and off-page optimisation:
On-page optimisation has to do with several
factors on a web page, namely:
Content:
A website that is lacking in relevant
content will never perform very well, you need to offer your
clients and prospective clients a wealth of relevant information.
People want to research products and services before making purchasing
decisions; they want to know who you are and why you are the best
company to fulfil their needs. If there is no content on your website,
clients will go elsewhere and the search engines cater to this
need by promoting websites will lots of relevant content and punishing
those with little or no relevant content.
Imagine having your shop
with no or very little stock in it and lots of empty shelves, this would
not do much to draw customers and keep them browsing your goods.
Complaint code:
SEO friendly
web design requires clean, high quality code. Web Standards
compliance ensures that your code is clean and high quality. This
ensures that web crawlers can easily index your website and, in
turn, the reward is higher rankings for your website with the popular
search engines, like Google.
Page
structure:
Research shows that people move away from one
website to another if they do not find what they are looking for, or if
something does not grab their attention within 7 seconds. This cannot be
achieved if it is difficult to navigate your website, or if your
content is not easy to read. The bottom line is that your
website must be simple with lots of relevant content. The same
as when you pick up a book or document, you want to be able to easily
read and understand it.
Popular search engines cater for the needs of
people that are using them to ensure that they find what they are
looking for. All popular search engines reward those websites that are
easy to navigate. They also reward websites that captivate their
visitors with website content that easily provides what visitors are
looking for.
Page title:
All
popular search engines use the </title> tag to display in their search
results, making it easier to find and index the page. Not having a page
title, or having one that is not meaningful means that the search
engines are going to rank another website with a relevant page title
above yours. Prospective clients are more likely to click on a
search result that is meaningful to their search term. If you don’t
have a page title or it is not meaningful to a search, then prospective
clients are less likely to select your website.
Alternate Text Tag:
Content,
as discussed above is of utmost importance to drawing and retaining your
clients and prospective clients, but what if that content is images
showing your visitors pictures of your products or services. Popular
search engines like Google cannot see the image, and the file name may
not be descriptive enough, so you will use an Alternate Text tag, or
Alt Tag to describe the image.
For example, “seo.gif” would not
be as helpful and descriptive as “Introduction to Search engine
optimization Article”. Imagine receiving a price list from a supplier
that only provided you with the stock codes, you may know what some of
them are, but you are going to struggle to find what you are looking
for. By adding the description to the stock code you can easily navigate
the price list.
Meta tags:
Meta description and Meta keyword tags can be described as a summary
outlining the most important points on your page. These Meta tags are
used by popular search engines to identify the most important aspects of
your website. Although most search engines do not place the same level
of importance on Meta description tags and Meta keyword tags as they
used too, the use of meta tags is still a useful tool for your website
and should still be used.
Correct
keyword placement:
Search engine optimisation is all
about relevance, Google and other popular search engines are trying to
ensure that their users find exactly what it is they are searching for.
To achieve this, the popular search engines try to display only the most
relevant websites within their top search results and so websites that
put effort into displaying only relevant content on their pages get
rewarded and those that do not, get penalised. Thus correct keyword
placement is of utmost importance when designing a website
for search engine optimisation.
Be sure to use keywords that are
relevant to your website, making sure that the content on your website
includes those keywords that are easy to read as well as search engine
friendly, avoid turning out mechanical sounding content. You
should also avoid misuse of your keywords and over use of your
keywords as this can cause lower rankings for your website.
Off-page optimisation, quite simply put, can
be defined as the way you would go about making your website popular.
Search engines measure your website’s popularity by looking at what
websites you are linking to (out bound linking) and more
importantly what websites are linking to your website (in bound
linking). This is called link popularity. Popular search
engines determine the following factors when looking at link
popularity:
How popular are the
websites linking to you?
If very popular websites,
like HP, are linking to your website, it shows that you yourself must be
popular. This increases your organic ranking.
How popular are the websites that you are
linking to?
Although this is not as weighted as inbound
linking, offering relevant links to your visitors increases your
popularity.
Are the websites that are
linking to you (inbound) relevant to your website?
If the
popular website linking to your site is not relevant, visitors are not
going to stay on your site for very long. It was not what the visitor
was looking for and so your rank will be negatively affected by links
that have little or no relevance.
How many websites are linking to your website?
Obviously the popularity of sites linking to your website
increases your popularity. Imagine that many other popular shops are
mentioning you with regards to the services or products you are
offering, this will increase the public’s awareness and confidence in
your company, and will bring many more feet through your door.
By
combining both on- and off-page optimisation, your website
will prosper increasing your organic ranking and your return on
investment. Jasper Consultants has a dedicated team to
help you with your SEO and that can monitor your
website’s online performance.