SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)

SEO (Search Engine Optimation) tends to be a bit of a mystery. You can ask a wide range of people what SEO actually is, but you’re unlikely to get matching answers. To us, SEO is all about getting the most out of your website. SEO helps your website show up in search engine results, providing essential exposure for your company website, so that your business can grow. This boils down to creating the best possible website, that search engines, and potential customers, can trust.

So how do we do this?

Good SEO practices, also known as white hat SEO, are not shrouded in technical magic or mystery. At least not anymore. Since Google’s biggest algorithm changes, such as Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird, SEO is more focused on user experience than ever before. The aim is to create a website full of high quality content, that can provide real value to the user, rather than using technical tools to claw your way to the top of the results.

When it comes to SEO, perseverance is key

Adding value to the user is all about creating original, high quality content, that provides useful and relevant information. But it also means that your website should be easy to navigate, visually interesting and provide opportunities for reward driven interaction. Get these basics in order, and your website will be well on the way to success.

On-page SEO? What’s that?

All of things that can be changed and altered with your webpage, is known as On-page SEO. And this is about making sure that the practicalities and content are perfect for search engine performance. For example:

• Using a descriptive, useful main header (tagged as H1 in the HTML code).
• Using further informative headers throughout the content (tagged as H2, H3 etc in the HTML code).
• Adding alt tags to images to provide a text based description, helpful when making your website accessible.
• Creating original, informative, unique content based on words and phrases relevant to your industry. Search engines like Google can recognise your general theme from this kind of clue.
• Using internal links to connect parts of your content to other, relevant pages of your website. This can provide further detail for users and help improve the user flow.
• Using external links to connect to other website that may be helpful or relevant for your website users. These external websites need to be reliable authoritative and credible online.
• Creating video content to make sure your website is fully engaging and somewhere your users want to spend more time.

What about Off-Page SEO?

All the adjustments that are made outside of your website, to improve your SEO, are known as off-page SEO. These can help to improve your websites performance, for example:

• Creating social profiles for your company, which link to your website. This will give your website a little bit more credibility for both Google, and your users.
• Encourage other relevant websites to link to your own. This is one of the hardest parts of off-page SEO although this type of link is extremely powerful. One way to achieve this is by leaving a positive review of a relevant product, and alerting the reviewed company. If you’re lucky, this company will link to your review content, from their own website.

In essence, you should always grow your website in favour of the human user, rather than for search engine performance. A better user experience, is one of the key ranking indicators used by industry giants like Google. So designing a website, or creating content to please them, instead of your user, will only be counter-productive.