It’s all very well having your ideal website but it’s not so ideal if visitors cannot find you on the major search engines.
Your visitors will use keywords to find what they are looking for on Google, so when deciding on what your keywords are you need to think about what people will type into Google to find your site. Also it is good to do a bit of research and ask around to see what others would type.
You will also need to consider the levels of competition for your particular keywords. The more competition you have the less chance you have of getting a high page ranking on Google. As an example, using the keywords ‘restaurants’ and ‘London’ are going to make your life very difficult as there are thousands of restaurants in London. In these cases you need to think about categorising and localising; e.g. ‘fish restaurants’ and ‘London SW6′ will give you a much better chance of being found. In some cases it might not be necessary to drill down at all. For example there probably aren’t many emu farmers in the UK, so they could probably keep their keywords at ‘emu farmers’ and ‘UK’.
Also consider that people want choice, they will be looking at your business in general and will tend search ‘emu farmers’ rather than ‘emu farmer’.
Once you know what your keywords are there are two elements to search engine optimisation.
ONE: How you present your website in terms of structure, content and code ensuring that effective keywords are incorporated correctly, here are some quick fixes that can be done to improve your rankings:
- Make sure that the content text in your home page says who you are and what you do. This should be fairly natural but also remember to include your location too. People will be searching for your product or service potentially in their local area.
- Add descriptions (alt tags and title tags) to your images that relate to your product or service.
- Complete the page title with relevant information rather than just “home page” (usually a maximum of 60-80 characters).
- Complete the page description metatag (usually a maximum of 250 characters)
- Complete the keywords metatag (use keywords and phrases separate by a comma)
- Keep the sizes of images as small as you can to ensure speedy page loading, search engines are starting to penalise slow loading pages.
The title tag* and description tag**, described above, are those that you then see in the Google search results, they are very important.
TWO: The second part to consider is how popular your website is with others, meaning how many websites outside of yours link back in to your website. Google sees this as a popularity contest and rates you according to the number of links you have coming in. Getting people to link to your site can be a bit of work and the more links you get that are relevant to your site content the better. This doesn’t mean that links from non-relevant sites are not important, they are but if the links coming in come from a site with content similar to yours this is even better. When you consider relevancy, if you are based in Yorkshire then the chances are that ‘Yorkshire’ will be one of your keywords. Therefore getting links back from other businesses in Yorkshire will be relevant to you even if they are not in your particular business sector.
This side of search engine optimisation is hard work and there are many companies out there who specialise in link building. If you decide to do this yourself, be careful to only list with reputable directories. You might not need it, not everyone does – just swapping links with other local businesses and friends can bring the desired results.
