Your Website is a tiny needle in a huge virtual haystack. With billions of web pages ready to be accessed on the internet – how can potential customers searching the web find yours? Do you miss out on potential business because your competitor’s website features more prominently in an internet Search engine than yours?
If this is the case, your website could benefit from Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Search engine optimisation (or SEO as it is usually shortened to) is the process of ‘tuning’ your site to improve its ranking in the internet search engine results when a user searches for particular keywords or phrases.
As a quick experiment, think of some keywords or a phrase that a user might search to find a product or service you offer. Now go to one of the sites listed in the top right of this page and search for that phrase.
Did you see your website listed in the search results? If so, in which position? If your site is already well optimised or you operate in a very niche field you may be lucky enough to feature on the first page of results. But more likely you’re languishing much further down, which unfortunately means that human nature will lead a user to give up searching well before they find your site and visit one of your competitors’ sites instead.
One of the best ways of improving your search position is to write good useful content and plenty of it! After all it is predominantly the text content of your site that a search engine is reading, so having lots of keyword-rich copy will really improve your ranking. If your web pages contain a photograph and one small paragraph of text, you really are giving the search engine nothing to work with!
By anticipating what phrases or keywords users may use to find your website you are in a good position to optimise your site’s content accordingly. For example, if your website is about your hotel in Liverpool, you should be including phrases like “hotels in Liverpool”, “accommodation in Liverpool” and “places to stay in Liverpool” liberally throughout your site.
Your web page may be visually appealing to a user, but how does your search engine read it? A search engine sees your page as nothing more than a chunk of HTML mode, so bad coding really can hamper all your efforts with creating good content. The flip-side of this is that there are many opportunities to optimise your websites codes to make it easier for a search engine to find relevant content. This requires knowledge of the many different optimisation techniques and the skills to apply them and of course Designated Associates will be happy to undertake this work for you.
As a final thought it is worth bearing in mind that having lots of websites linking to your website can dramatically improve your search engine ranking. Why? Well, from the point of view of a search engine, why would all these other sites link to yours, if not for the fact that your site must have some useful content on it? It is well worth publicising your site through trade association sites and link-exchange programmes for instance.