Whether you trade in the high street or online you need a website. It’s your shop window online, a way of communicating with your customers. It represents your business 24/7 and communicates on your behalf to whomever, whenever and wherever they may be.
Your website from design to content tells a story about who you are and what kind of business you offer. If you get it wrong you can look tired and old fashioned when you’re trying for clean and sleek or unprofessional or even childlike when you’re trying for relaxed and casual.
Your knowledge of your target market and research of competitor sites will help you master the look of your site. But no matter how fantastic a job you do, if search engines aren’t able to find you, or your site doesn’t list on the first Google results page for your main keywords, you risk becoming all but invisible.
Ranking with the search engines,
To tackle this you need to rank well with search engines. And to do this you need to understand search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website in search engines. It is one of the most important aspects of online marketing.
If you carry out SEO properly you should see an improvement in where your website pages rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs) when typing in the main keywords for your business. Over time you should see increasing numbers of visitors to your site which should lead to an increase in business.
There are several ways to achieve SEO, including improving the website’s content, layout, on-page elements (including titles, meta descriptions and keywords), backlinks and social media engagement. In some cases, paid advertising may also be used to improve rankings.
First things first
There are two types of SEO, off-page SEO and on-page SEO. On-page SEO is about optimising your site for search engines by making changes to the website. Off page SEO, by contrast, is about the optimisation of elements outside of your website using, for example, social media engagement and backlinks.
If you want to see your website on the first page of Google and other search engines, you need to do both.
Off-page SEO
Search engines rank websites that get traffic. Its like an endorsement of your content. The more visits to your site, the more relevant your content is considered.
Social media
Social media is a great way to drive traffic to your site. It also builds your brand by raising awareness. In today’s business world a social media presence is not a choice.
Backlinks
Backlinks are a link to your website from another website. They are probably one of the most important aspects of SEO. Google rates backlinks very highly and its worth your effort to create a good link building strategy. But beware, not all links are considered good.
Good backlinks are from other websites relevant to your own. They would ideally not have been paid for and be from credible sites. For instance if you are a book seller a backlink to your site from a publisher would be a good, strong blacklink. As would a link from a local library, book review site, etc.
Bad backlinks are from irrelevant websites and ‘link farms’. A link farm is a group of websites that link to each other simply to improve their rankings on the search engine. The problem with these sorts of links is they usually come from irrelevant websites to your own. The quality of content on the websites vary and is often poor and the backlink is not a recommendation of the content on your site. Consequently too many bad backlinks will harm your rankings.
On Page SEO
Here your efforts will be to optimise the website itself. Search engines use a programme called a web crawler to find web pages which it then indexes. As it finds one page it moves to another via internal links. So, to rank in search results, you need the web crawler to index your site in the first place. This might involve having a site map on your website.
You would still need to meet the other criteria set by the search engines which are designed to improve the search experience for the user. So here are some considerations to help you achieve this.
Content and keywords
If you want to achieve high ranking ‘organic results’ your content will need to be of a good quality and relevant to your field. When a person searches the internet using a search engine they type in keywords. The expectation is that these keywords will bring up content considered relevant. Google considers search results that contain the same keywords as a search to be a good indicator of relevance. This means if someone searches on house plants they expect to find information on house plants. So you need to be sure your content contains the keywords your customers are most likely to search on.
To find the right keywords you should do keyword research. Google provides a facility to do this, as do other search engines.
You could pay for your position on the search engine results page using Pay per click (PPC) which allows you to pay for keywords. So, for instance, Google will rank your webpages whenever someone searches using your keywords. The position of your web pages on the search engines results pages will depend on how much you bid for the keyword.
On-page elements
Another consideration should be on-page elements. On page elements include the quality of the code used to build the site, the speed of the site, titles, meta descriptions, internal links, images and image tags, etc. You will need to become familiar with these terms and understand how to optimise all your on page elements if you want good results.
MOZ offer an excellent guide for beginners who would like to learn more about SEO. Google offer the SEO Checker tool which is free to use and will analyse your site to identify any problems. It will also make suggestions for improvements.
And finally…..
This is not intended to be a comprehensive guide but an introduction to the subject. If you’re interested in taking this further take a look at the Beginners Guide to SEO by MOZ as linked to above. There you should also find details of how to build good backlinks to your site, avoid bad backlinks and get the right keywords on your webpages. If you would prefer to outsource your SEO to a digital marketing agency it would still be helpful to understand the processes. Your website, whether its an ecommerce or brouchure site, is a crucial tool for the success of business in todays digital world. If you want to make an impression and stand out from the competition, SEO is key.