Search Engine Optimisation (known in the industry as SEO) is the method of increasing your website’s ranking in the natural, or ‘organic’ listings in Google and other search engines. The end result should be that your website appears on Page 1, as high up the page as possible.

The basic SEO of a website should be done when the website is built, i.e. at the start of its life-cycle. However, there are many websites out there with inadequate, or even no SEO in place. Luckily, SEO can be performed on the majority of websites, and can lead to real, visible results.

At Web Consultants, all of our new websites have basic search engine optimisation built in from the ground up. However, we can also optimise existing website, using the following basic techniques (amongst others).

Basic SEO steps to success

Step 1: Define your keywords

The first step is to decide on your keywords. These are the words that you wish to be found for when someone searches within Google or one of the other search engines (Bing, Yahoo etc.) For example, if you’re a hair and beauty business based in York, you’re probably going to want to attract clients local to York. In this case, your keywords might include ‘hair, beauty, salon, treatments, york’ amongst others. If someone searches for ‘beauty in york’, you would hope to appear as high up page 1 as possible. Therefore people would see your listing before others, and click the link to your website, hopefully resulting in business for you!

Different pages can have different keywords. Taking the ‘hair and beauty in york’ example above, the home page may include the keywords mentioned earlier, but other pages may wish to be more specific. For example, on a ‘Hair salon’ page you may wish to include keywords such as ‘colour, highlights, blowdry, keratin treatment’.

It’s important that these keywords appear in the content of the page several times. The number of times keywords appear, compared to other words in the content is called ‘Keyword Density’. This is a factor in deciding how relevant your page is to a search term. The search engines will use it to help rank your website.

Step 2: Relevant descriptions

The next step is to write a description of each page. This should be a short concise description of the page, or in the case of your home page, a description of what your business offers. Again, this should feature as many of the keywords in your keyword list as possible.

Step 3: Conciseness

Next, make sure all of your pages are concise, and the most important information is near the top of the page.

Step 4: Analytics

Ensure that your website is enrolled with Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster. This will allow you to track how your website is performing, and give clues as to where it can be optimised further.

Step 5: Regular review

We use tools which monitor the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, tracking keywords, meta data and other factors. These provide insights into future optimisation.

We provide a monthly SEO and report service which enables us to track your campaigns and make changes on an ongoing basis, to increase your website’s ranking. Our prices for this service start at just £400 per month.

Note: Websites can take 4 – 6 weeks after going live before they start to appear in search engine listings. Even the most well-optimised site can take a while, and this is down to the speed with which Google’s robots find your site in the first place, before they can spider through it and put it into the listings. If your website doesn’t appear in the rankings after 6 weeks, you need to look at the optimisation that has been done, along with the reports from Analytics to work out what can be improved.

E-mail us at info@websiteconsultants.co or call 01765 35 70 70 with your requirements, and let us show you what’s possible.