Search engine optimisation (SEO) plays an important part in driving targeted traffic to your website through natural listings on Search Engines.

All effective search engine marketing starts with research into the actual phrases (keywords) typed by real customers into search engines every day.

SEO can be split into 3 main parts; Keyword research, applying that research to on page optimisation and backlinking, all of them crucial to the success of your website.

1. Keyword research.

This can be split into 2 searches, short tail key phrases and long tail key phrases.

Short tail phrases are terms like, “SEO” or “web design” and if you were after nationwide business, then these might be relevant to you finding suitable customers. Short tail’s take more work to rank for and offer less qualified traffic.

Long tail versions of these phrases would include, “web design North Yorkshire”, “SEO in Yorkshire”, “SEO in Leeds”and so on. If these areas are where your customers are based, then long tail phrases are going to bring you highly targeted traffic.

As we specialise in local business websites the majority of our keyword research is targeting long tail phrases and typically these have less competition and convert better. This helps us to keep our prices low, you get a better return for your money and your customers find exactly what they are searching for, therefore the click through rate should be higher.

2. On page optimisation

On page optimisation should be done straight after choosing your keywords and if you stick to the following rules, your website will rank much better in the search engines.

Titles are very important. These appear at the top of the browser and are often picked up by search engines and used in the wording of results. Include keywords in the title, keep it short, but to the point and create different titles for each page of your site.

Make sure your URL’s are search engine friendly. Sometimes if sites are designed using CMS (Content management system) the URL’s on deeper pages contain so many letters that the Google bots can’t index the pages properly. Modify any URL’s like this so that they are short, descriptive and include relevant keywords.

The meta description shows up in the code of the page, so make certain each page on your site has it’s own unique meta description tag. The meta description is often used to describe the page in the search engine results after listing the page title. If your meta description is relevant, it increases the odds of people clicking on your listing. It can also be used to indicate some call to action on the site.

Use h1 and h2 tags when you structure the body of the site, as the Search Engines place a high priority on words in these tags. Being ranked number 1 in Google will be worthless if the content on your site is not relevant or the content is confusing. Sometimes coders forget that people are reading the page as well as the Google bots, so give them priority when designing and coding sites.

Remember to place Alt attributes on pictures. If you describe all the pictures on your site, then the search engines will see that even the images are relevant to the keywords and as a result your site is more likely to show up in the results when people search for images.

Content is king! It’s very important to have enough relevant content on all your pages and to make sure the entire page reads smoothly and is easy to understand. Links out to other sites are good, as long as they are relevant, but be careful of having too many outbound links on any one page of a site.

A lot of people think that you build a website, wait for the traffic and then watch the orders flood in. A website needs to be constantly evolving, so you should always be updating and modifying information on your site. If you want people coming back to your site you have to give them something to come back for. By using article marketing on a site you also get indexed faster and improve your chance of ranking well in Google, as they will view your site as being up to date, accurate and relevant.

3. Off page optimisation/backlinking

Incoming links are what determine your natural search engine placement. Although all the on-page SEO techniques do influence your seo ranking, it is the inbound links that really make a difference to the strength of your web pages and how competitive they are in ranking for certain phrases. The more strength, the higher in the search engines your web pages will be.

Your website will benefit most if you focus mainly on “off page” search engine optimisation factors, as this is what will get your website to the top of the search engines. Off page optimisation places a great deal of importance on which other websites are linking to your website and how they’re doing it. Emphasis is placed on: