search engine optimisation (SEO)
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Somewhere near the top of most customers' priority list is a good Internet search engine ranking for their website; after all it's no use having a professional website if it can't be found by your potential customers; indeed exposure is a fundamental requirement for any website. It's your shop window to the world, meaning it's essential to make a good impression on any potential customers - assuming your potential customers can find it in the first place of course!
Our web development team has many years experience successfully developing business critical websites that are heavily dependent on a good Internet search engine ranking. We fully understand what makes a search engine "friendly" website and also the pitfalls of throwing money into pay-per-click, sponsored link campaigns. That is not to discard this method; but simply to demonstrate a pragmatic approach to using it.
If your company has a website, you probably already appreciate what a powerful tool it can be for marketing your products and services.
But could it be doing more for you? How easily is your site found by a potential customer, searching the web for a product or service you provide? Do you lose out on potential business because your competitor's websites feature more prominently in the internet search engines than yours?
If this is the case, your website could benefit from search engine optimisation.
What is search engine optimisation?
Search engine optimisation (or SEO as it is usually shortened to) is the process of "tuning" your site to improve it's ranking in the internet search engine results when a user searches for particular keywords or phrases.
As a quick experiment, think of some keywords or a phrase that a user might search for to find a product or service you offer. Now go to the Google website and search for that phrase.
Did you see your website listed in the search results? If so, in which position? If your site is already well optimised, or you operate in a very niche field, you may be lucky enough to feature on the first page of results. But more likely, you're languishing much further down, which unfortunately means that human nature will lead a user to give up searching well before they find your site, and visit one of your competitors sites instead.
What is involved in search engine optimisation?
There is a lot of hearsay and myths surrounding SEO, and many people may have you believe that improving your search ranking is something of a black art. However, when you appreciate how a search engine ranks a website or webpage, the whole process is actually quite logical, and boils down to good common sense.
Create great content
One of the best ways of improving your search position is to write good useful content, and plenty of it! After all, it is predominantly the text content of your site that a search engine is reading, so having lots of keyword-rich copy really will improve your ranking. If your web pages contain a photograph and one small paragraph of text, you really are giving a search engine nothing to work with!
Know your audience
By anticipating what phrases or keywords users may use to find your website, you are in a good position to optimise your site's content accordingly. For example if your website is about search engine optimisation in North Wales, you should be including phrases like "SEO in North Wales", "search engine optimisation in North Wales" and "SEO in Chester" liberally throughout your site.
Good coding
Your web page may be visually appealing to a user, but how does a search engine read it? A search engine sees your page as nothing more than a chunk of HTML code, so bad coding really can hamper all your efforts with creating good content. The flip-side of this is that there are many opportunities to optimise your website's code to make it easier for a search engine to find relevant content. Of course, Samarind will be happy to undertake this work for you.
Spread the word
As a final thought, it is worth bearing in mind that having lots of websites linking to your website can dramatically improve your search engine ranking. Why? Well, from the point of view of a search engine, why would all these other sites be linking to yours, if not for that fact that your site must have some useful content on it? It is well worth publicising your site through trade association sites for instance, or by setting up reciprocal links with complementary sites.
Google Site Maps
Google Site Maps are a new service offered by Google, and provide information about the pages on your site such as their relative importance, change frequency etc. Although they are not a substitute for good search engine optimisation in themselves, they can help an otherwise well optimised website.
We use Google Sitemaps to inform Google about all your pages and to help people discover more of your web pages.
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To discover how Samarind search engine optimisation service can help your improve your website's presence in search engines, please contact us by email, phone or fax, or use our online enquiry form.