Search Engine Optimisation
There is no point in having a beautiful website if it can't be found, getting a good search engine ranking is essential in driving visitors to your site. But it is no easy task, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of companies specialising in SEO - search engine optimisation. A quick search on Google will return pages of companies charging literally £000's to improve your listing and get you the 'holy grail' - the number one spot!
However, don't be disheartened, a well planned site with good content can often achieve a suprisingly good ranking. We recently designed a small site for one of our clients which now ranks on the first page of Google for their chosen keywords. Try it search "dea in cornwall" and look for Polglase Property. At the time of writing another client ranks No.1 for their keywords - search "convenience store saltash" and look for Church Road Stores. Both receive a level of traffic respectable in their fields, and if you're new to the world of the internet we'll show you how to monitor your websites traffic, once it has 'gone live'.
To optimise your site, in the first instance think about what your potential customers would type into a search engine in order to find you eg "plumber in kent", these are your "keywords". Try it yourself and see if your competitors appear, if they do, look at where they appear in the listing. We'll make it our target to leapfrog you above them in the rankings. The first thing you can do is to look again at your content and see how many times you have used your chosen keywords or phrase. It should be included in the body of your site as many times as possible, this plus some other things that we can do in coding your site will at least give you a head start when we submit it to the search engines. Once listed we will happily review your content again based on your Google ranking and 'tweak' the content if necessary.
BE WARNED! - simply repeating your keywords over and over will not get you the top spot! The search engines are becoming more sophisticated in the way that they rank pages. Your keywords should be included in such a manner that they form part of the normal flow of your text. If you can read the content without consciously noticing any repetition, then you have nothing to worry about.
Links are another good way of improving your pages rank within Google, however avoid the temptation of paying for '3rd party' links "...100 links guaranteed! Only £:29!..." , Google now asks people to report paid links and if discovered on a site can lead to it being banned completely. That said, quality relevant links will always boost your ranking, consider asking clients, customers or suppliers if they would add a link to your site. Trade bodies and associations will also often have a list of members with links to their websites, consider this also if it applies to you. The recent surge in popularity of 'Social Bookmarking' has proved a boon for many websites, adding a bookmarking link (as seen in our nav bar on the left), allows visitors to bookmark your site which generates another link back to you. The larger 'paper' directories such as Yellow Pages and Thomson are now online too, you could consider advertising with these too, however my own personal experience from analysing traffic through our own sites, is that the level of referrals is poor for the financial outlay. You should make your own decisions based on your particular line of business
If your budget allows, you could consider running an 'Adwords' campaign, these can be very cost effective and will definitely kick start your new website. In simple terms, an adword campaign lets you 'buy' premium advertising space for your chosen keywords and phrases, thus putting you in front of your target audience and boosting your sites traffic. Click Here if you want to learn more about Google adwords.
Finally, don't underestimate the importance of your URL, your www address, using all or part of your keywords here will also add further weight to your listing. For example if you run a dental practice in Hull, you could consider using "www.hulldentists.co.uk" as your chosen URL, you can always buy the domain name of your business as well and 'point it' at your other domain or vice-versa, try and think outside of the box!
