Search Engine Optimisation

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

A lot of SEO companies try and make out that it is some unweildy and complicated beast. Here is a simple overview of what it is to search engine optimise your website:

Search engine optimisation is the process of ensuring that your website and its pages are visible to search engines when people search for the things you want to be found for and that you come up as high as possible in the listings for those searches.

When someone searches on google two things happen: Firstly google finds all the pages on the web that match the search query; secondly it ranks these pages based upon how important it feels each page is relative to the search term. A particular page is considered to be important if it has lots of links to it from other important sites and those links also contain words relative to what the user has searched for.

How do you do SEO?

So if a site is optimised then it has been constructed in a way that a search engine such as google aren't penilising it (e.g. it follows standards and is on a fast server) , but also so that the words used on it and how they are used mean that google associates your pages with the search terms that people are searching for.

• Picking the right words for every page
  This involves researching what people are searching for, how competitive those terms are and what terms we should choose to target. It may also mean that we create a few versions of certain pages of your site in order to target a few different searches.
• Ensuring build quality
  We build our sites to meet the latest W3C HTML standards. This has a lot of benefits but one of them is that search engines like that our code quality is higher. We are also able to edit existing sites to make them follow these standards.
• Providing content creation tools
  A big part of SEO is actually you having the ability to create and administer your own content in a way that makes sure search engines can grab and use it. When we build new sites that are content managed we also ensure that these systems have the right features within them that allow you to create content and put it into the right places so it can be found by search engines.
• Link Bait
  Remember we said that links to your site are important? Never create spam links back to your site. We recommend instead creating "Link Bait". Link bait is essentially the process of creating content on your site that people want to link to. This is a little bit strategic and highly dependent on your business model and nature of website so it is worth us talking about in more detail before getting started.
• Directory submission
  Submitting your sites to a range of credible directories such as Google Places and DMOZ can be a quick way to lend a new site some page rank credability.

The list of possible approaches goes on but this demonstrates that we know what needs to be done and have the approach to achieve it. Strictly speaking SEO is a long game but sometimes you can get some quick wins.

How is SEO Charged for?

Whether a site is new or old the first option is to bring it up to a good SEO standard by applying some of the stuff we discussed above. This is normally a fixed price based on what needs to be done and is dependent on the number of pages, technologies the site uses and initial build quality.

Because a lot of what SEO entails is strategic copywriting and content creation another option if you regularly create content is to assign a monthly budget to your SEO strategy. This means that every month a set ammount of time will be spent researching keywords for new content, creating tailored versions of pages to target words, updating the way copy has been written etc. This gives you the piece of mind that your site is constantly being kept up to a good SEO standard.

How do you measure success?

Tools such as Google Analytics are very easy to install and allow you to see trends in visitor numbers, search terms used to get to the site, devices used, location etc. So for example if lots of people were coming to a particular page as a result of searcing for "lemons birmingham" then you could see how many and when. If you are seeing lots of traffic coming to your site from pages that have been optimised, or if overall traffic from search engines is increasing then this is a good incidation that your search engine strategy is working.

If you want to get more creative then we can implement clever goal tracking techniques. For example if the ultimate goal of your site (and measure of success for it) is to generate leads via a particula contact form then we can set it up so that google knows when this event has happened and ties it back to your other website analytics data.

What next?

It may be that a call and some initial advice is all you need for now, or if you need a very structured approach then we are able to audit your SEO approach and suggest approaches both strategically, functionally and from a content perspective.

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