Website SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the means by which websites are fine-tuned so that they can be found more easily on websites. It represents your company website’s best and most cost-effective opportunity of getting on Google on a long-term basis. But how can you make website SEO work for you?
Website SEO explained in simple terms
Website SEO can be broadly split into two distinct areas: ‘on site’ and ‘off site’. What this means is that both internal and external factors can be adjusted in order to help a website attract the attention of search engines such as Google, with those sites boasting the best standards of website SEO appearing nearer the top of the Google ‘natural’ (or ‘organic’) results listings. Ranking high in Google’s natural listings is important, because it’s a well established fact that the vast majority of Google users much prefer to click on the natural results listings over the ‘paid for’ listings that appear across the top and down the right-hand side of the results pages. The sites appearing nearer the top of the natural listings stand the best chance of enticing the search engine users to click through to them. Needless to say, competition for this hot territory is intense, which is why a clever, informed approach to the intricacies of website SEO is needed in order to succeed.
Website SEO – on site factors
On site changes in website SEO mainly centre around content. Having relevant, engaging and clever content on your website significantly enhances your reputation with the search engines, and also appeals to users. So within your content you need to ensure that you’re including a good coverage of keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business and your wider market. But you also need to be clever with these keywords and phrases, because in any given market there are lots and lots of websites all competing for the same territory – and to get into those much sought-after top 10 or 20 results listings on Google takes considerable website SEO skill and knowledge. Rest assured, you’re very unlikely to feature in high Google rankings any time soon if you base your website content around a narrow range of ‘big phrases’ within your industry, simply because the competition for big phrases is so fierce.
So if you sell second-hand caravans, then merely repeating the word ‘caravan’ over and over on your site is not only going to make your content look spammy and less readable, it’s also not doing anything for your search engine rankings. Clever content contains ‘long-tail’ keywords and phrases, which target a wider range of more specific terms that users type into search engines. So, including phrases like ‘used 4 berth touring caravans’ or ‘cheap second hand touring caravans’ alongside your industry’s ‘big phrases’ in your website content is far more likely to see your site rank higher on Google, and you’ll also attract much higher quality traffic, simply due to the much more specific nature of the phrase. Long tail content is clever website SEO.
Other on site changes involve making sure that your website’s meta-data is optimised, containing a range of relevant keywords and written in such a way that will encourage users to click through to your website. Meta-data gives search engines and users an overview of your website, and as such needs to bear strongly on the content contained within your webpages.
Website SEO – off site factors
Who you link to and who links to you also has a big influence on how highly the search engines regard the quality of your website. Off site factors by nature are much harder to control than on site factors, but they’re worth the effort because search engines really like to see who regards your website as a good source, as well as what sites you regard as high quality. Links help the search engines place your website into a wider context, allowing them to decide how to rank you in their results (after also referring to your one-site factors, of course).
Off page factors are especially important when competing on high volume search terms (the ‘big keywords’ we mentioned earlier), because they offer the search engines a wider set of criteria by which to assess any number of websites containing similarly well optimised keyword content. In these situations, the off page factors will be the most important for determining how high a website will rank, because they help establish which sites have greater domain authority for a given set of terms. Domain authority is one of the reasons why it’s incredibly tough for smaller or newer sites to compete for high volume search phrases, so it’s very good to know that as search terms grow in length (i.e. into long-tail phrases), then search engines drop domain authority from their ranking decision-making processes and focus mainly on the actual phrase itself. The upshot is that competing on longer-tail phrases is much more of a level playing field, allowing the opportunity for smaller websites to use clever website SEO to beat their bigger rivals to the higher quality traffic. The long-tail is gold for SMEs.
Website SEO by the Web Marketing Group
At the Web Marketing Group, we’ve got clever website SEO sussed. We’ve developed what we firmly believe to be the most intelligent long-tail keyword service on the market – LTaS. Our LTaS service is already generating fantastic results for our 500+ clients, and you can benefit from it too.
To see how, request your FREE no obligation website SEO analysis and proposal from us. What you’ll get is over 30 pages of bespoke, hand-assembled analysis of your website and a proposal detailing what we feel we can do to improve it. You’ve got nothing to lose and potentially everything to gain. Request yours today.
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