Get noticed

SEO Techniques

Here are a few hints and tips to help you optimise your rankings on search engines.

Quality links matter...

Every link back to your site increases its prominence in the search results. Not only that but it also matters what sites link to yours. A link from a high profile, established and trusted site will carry more weight and have a greater effect in where you appear in the search results.

Here are some free ways to create links back to your site...

Register your company on as many free listings sites that you can. Yell, Thompson local, local business directories etc. The more the merrier. Make sure every listing has your contact details, map reference, and of course a link back to your site.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - create accounts for your business, and then post regularly. Where relevant, make sure posts contains a link back to your site. (an offer, latest news, blog etc)

Let Google know who you are...

Register your company on Google places (add you name, address, phone etc)
Register your site on Google's webmaster tools
Upload a sitemap to webmaster tools. (you can create a suitable map here)
Register with Google Analytics and then learn from what it tells you as the months go by.

Optimise your site for mobiles

As time passes more and more people will view your site on tablets and mobile devices. It's important that your site is mobile responsive, ie it dynamically changes to look good, and is readable in every environment. Google now penalise non mobile responsive sites in their search rankings.

Developing your site to be mobile responsive is often straight forward. Contact us and we'll provide you with a quote for the work.

Keywords

Up until recently search engines looked at "keywords" for your site. These keywords were stored in the code of the page in metatags, and search engines used them to ascertain the relevance of your site and determine it's ranking within search results.

Well, that's all changed. Because keywords were being massively abused, search engines have stopped looking at them altogether. Instead, search engines now look at the text on your pages in order to rank your site.

So, here's what we recommend. Firstly, think about the phrases you'd like to found by. What search terms do you think people are likely to use to find your site? Write a list of these keyword phrases, and make sure that these phrases appear in the text of your website. Write your text for human visitors, but be aware that search engines will read your text too. Keep the keyword density between 3 and 7 percentage of overall text. ie for every 100 words of text, only 3 to 7 of them should be a keyword phrase.

Optimise your site content...

It's vital that the text on your site reflects the services you offer. Write for human visitors, but be aware that Bots (automated web crawlers), will look at your content too. Think of the search terms people are likely to use when looking for your services, and then make sure these phrases appear regularly in your content, keywords, headers and descriptions.

You won't necessarily be able to control everything on this list, but here are a few steps to take.

Content - make sure your keywords and phrases appear within the text of your pages
Title - make sure every page has one
Meta keyword phrases - we recommend adding no keywords to your site. See keywords section above.
Meta description - meta description should be precise and clear, this will be stated beneath your title in search results. Users will decide whether to visit your site or not by reading this description, so craft it carefully.
Place your keyword phrases in Header tags (H1,H2, H3,H4)
Put keywords phrases in the initial sentence
Place your keywords phrases in the file name
Include Keywords in the file name of images
Add keywords to Alt tags of images
Add keywords to title attributes
Keywords in the anchor text to internal pages
Link keywords in the articles to another article of the same website using Anchor text.
Keywords in the internal link can go the home page.
Offload your javascript
Include the keywords in the javascript file in HTML comment tags
Code to text ratio(minimise the code and maximise the content)
Reduce the loading time of your webpage
Keep the keyword density between 3 and 7 percentage

Be patient...

Google will crawl your site every week or so. Don't expect miracles over night, it generally takes a couple of months to climb the search rankings.

Or pay for ads...

Google ads work on a pay-per-click basis, and you can set a daily budget. If you're not appearing on page one for a particular search phrase it might be worth paying for a Google ad, just for those phrases. Remember, to be efficient you want to keep those phrases narrow (ie `Football supplies croydon`). Broad search terms (ie `football`) will use up your daily budget without attracting real potential customers.