Some ins and outs of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

As businesses look more to optimising and improving their websites, Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO for short) becomes more important to their online marketing strategy.

As I discussed in my previous post you must give any SEO campaign time. I'm afraid there's no quick fix, back door or other clever way of boosting how high up you appear on search results. In fact, trying to use so called 'black hat' SEO techniques will work against you - in the past such practices were quite common - things like creating numerous landing pages laden with your target keywords. These worked for a short while but the search engines soon got wise to them and they won't work for you any more.

So what does work? Your SEO strategy should be realistic, be given time and adhere to good optimisation practices ('white hat' SEO). Of the many ongoing optimisation tasks the following are key:

- Content: What is written on your website, what does it talk about, making it readable but relevant to your products and services. Also making sure the code around your written content is well constructed e.g. using descriptive headings in a correct and SEO friendly way.
- Technical structure: or the 'code' behind your website. Some of this you see, some you don't but it's all important - things like your page titles, descriptive (hidden or meta data) behind each page and how the site is coded (the HTML code that ultimately makes up your web pages - this is how search engines read your website and not necessarily in the same way we do i.e. on your computer screen)
- Page Naming: Ensuring your web pages are named in a logical and descriptive way e.g. a page called car-cleaning-products.html is far more SEO friendly than one called ourproducts.html
- Links (internal): Good internal linking, meaning providing links throughout your website to other areas of your own website and making these as descriptive as possible e.g. Link to your products page with a link 'Cleaning Products' rather than something like 'Click here'.
- Links (external): Possibly the most important and powerful ongoing SEO actvities you should undertake. Building good quality (meaning from other websites relevant to yours) links should be a core SEO activity. This subject warrants a post of its own, which I will cover in the near future because it's one that I discuss a lot with my clients and it's one of the key SEO activites you should be doing.

You can read more detailed information about the SEO activities outlined above on our website search engine optimisation services page.

In summary, there are a number of aspects to improving and working on your search engine positioning for your website. Some can be fixed quite quickly and easily and others need ongoing work, monitoring and analysis. Above all else, take your TIME working on it and give it TIME to start working for you...it'll be worth the wait.