With around 2.1 billion users online and millions of websites to search, it can be difficult to make your website stand out from the crowd. It doesn’t matter if you are the proud owner of a top quality web page; being able to drive traffic to your website is what will ultimately dictate how successful it is.
However, it is not all about the hit count. Ensuring that you attract the right users is ultimately the goal for any business that cherishes its website as a key element in the marketing plan. What is important is how the online community can find your website, therefore it is essential to do all you can to give yourself a competitive edge to push your website above the canopy of the online jungle. In this context, the old property adage of ‘location, location, location’ could not ring truer.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is now an essential tool for any business with a website. Good SEO determines how visible your website is to people searching key words or phrases on any of the top search engines, via unpaid, or ‘natural’ methods. Whilst investing heavily in the art of SEO will bring significant fruits of labour, there are some simple steps and rules that small business owners and managers can follow to help boost visibility of your website amongst the top search engines.
The first is simply put, content. It may appear an obvious rule but the content of a website is vital. Not only is this the factor that creates ‘stickiness’ (keeping people on the website), but just as importantly, it is what search engines read to determine your site’s ranking. From the content, it is possible to deduce what your website’s keywords should be, which is what search engines read to determine the relevancy of the content to the search term. These should be a combination of both words from the site and also phrases that people might search in relation to your business. There are a number of available keyword tools that will introduce you to keywords that you may not have thought of yourself.
It is also advantageous to target ‘longtail’ keywords and phrases to decrease the competitiveness of the term. For example, the term ‘solicitor’ will be difficult to rank highly for so extend the keyword phrase to ‘criminal law solicitor’ or ‘solicitor Oxford Street’. This will help increase your sites ranking, as the search results are narrowed.
As well as the text content, image content is as equally important in maximising search engine returns. You can describe images using an alt tag, which is the text that is displayed when you hover the cursor over the image. Search engines can then index your images and find pages using the alt tag descriptions.
Keywords can be used to create rich link text for anchor text, which is the text that is used in a hyperlink that users can click on. Using the keywords in an anchor text link is another simple yet highly effective way of increasing a ranking for a particular word or phrase. Similarly, it is also essential to have relevant inbound links to your website. Search engines see a link almost like a vote from one website to another and they have a very strong hand in influencing search rankings. Having a good number of quality links with relevant anchor text will increase the standing of your site applied by search engines. However, it is important to recognise that search engines are extremely clever and can spot reciprocal or ‘paid for’ links. If an engine believes that you are using spam links, they may impose penalties, which result in a negative effect on your SEO efforts!
Meta data is another feature that contributes towards describing what a website is about. The meta title refers to the descriptive tag that exists at the top of an internet browser detailing what that web page is about. Not only are these displayed to the user in search engine results but they are also used to determine the content and relevance of your site in relation to specific keywords when performing a search. To increase the effectiveness of a meta title, use individual ones on each page with user friendly and keyword rich text. The more in tune with potential web user searches this is, the more likely it will be that your web page appears at the top of a search engine search.
Another feature of meta data is meta description. These do not contribute towards search engine placement but add to the user experience. Meta descriptions are small snippets of text in the search results describing the site and will ultimately determine if a user clicks on your website link or not.
Finally, in terms of how you construct your website, a must do is to include a site map linking directly to all of the pages on your website, this way search engines will index all of them. This can be improved by adding a HTML site map at the footer of your site, aiding search engines to find the relevant pages of your website.
Once your website has been constructed to achieve the best possible search optimisation, it then falls to a website owner to keep the site regularly updated. Both users and search engines love original, fresh content. The simplest way to do this is to include an opinion blog that you can contribute to regularly. Look online for any number of tools that can analyse your website to check for broken links and monitor anchor text. Using these will pick up on any site construction issues and ensures that your website is continually returned from online searches.
SEO is not a new idea to a seasoned website manager, however it is a very powerful weapon for raising the profile of your business, by encouraging online traffic towards your website. With 29 million searches occurring online each minute in 2010, placing your website at the top of the search results will only help to attract new customers to your business.
