What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a marketing strategy which looks at what people are searching for, and then improves the internal and external aspects of the site to increase the number of targeted visitors.

Apart from the obvious benefit of SEO – that is, increasing the number of targeted visitors to a site, there are a number of other ‘not-so-obvious’ benefits as well. These include:

• A high listed site represents promotion that doesn’t sleep. Doesn’t matter what time it is, the internet is available 24*7. If your site is well optimised – then so are you.
• Observing sensible optimisation rules can make your site more accessible to all users.
• It’s cost effective. As long as you make sure that SEO is part of your website strategy from the beginning, and you continue to monitor the latest SEO trends.

How to Implement SEO

The following are some tips you should consider when optimizing your site.

1. Keyword Use

The first thing you need to do here is determine what the main keywords are of your product or service. There are a number of keyword suggestion tools available on the web to help you. To get you started, visit Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

The next step is to look at where you need to place your keywords:

• Keywords in Title Tags: The most important spot would have to be making sure that your keywords are in the Title Tags. Title tags look like <title>Descriptive Keyword Title Phrase</title>.
• Keywords in Meta Tags: Not as important as it once was, however, a good SEO strategy makes sure that you’ve looked at all aspects. So do include your keywords in the meta tag. As long as you don’t abuse this tool, it wont hurt your search rankings.
• Keywords in Body Tags: It is important to use the keyword phrase throughout the page where it makes sense.

2. Link Popularity

This looks at the overall popularity of your site based on the number of links to and from your site. So when establishing links, consider both the quality and quantity of these links, making sure that the links on your page point to high quality, topically-related pages.

3. What not to do

The following components may negatively affect the site’s ranking in search engines.

Site is Down

When the site's down, it doesn’t just mean that the site is inaccessible to visitors, but it also affects a spider’s (program that crawls the website) ability to crawl the page.

Buried Pages

Spiders will often ignore pages that are buried too far down. A useful rule of thumb is to make sure that your content is no more than 3 clicks away from your Home Page.

Conclusion

Ultimately a good ranking website is a culmination of many strategies. Whilst we’ve listed a couple of points to help you get started, this by no means represents a conclusive list. If you would like to know about SEO, or would like to speak to us and discuss strategies you can implement, please contact us.