Focus on… SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Yup, you’ve got a successful business and have now followed the hype, jumped onto the online bandwagon and set up a website. This may have just been a check box exercise – after all, a website’s handy to have, or maybe you had dreams, desires and goals for your online presence?

Come ‘go live’ day you feel both trepidation in case something goes wrong, then a huge sigh of relief as everything works and your business bursts into action online. Will the investment of both time and money into your website pay off or will your shiny new site go unnoticed and unloved?

Your website should be your most effective marketing, lead generation and sales channel by a huge margin. You know the benefits of being online so I won’t go on about them, but what actually happens when you launch?

Well, unless you’re extremely lucky, you’re not the only person in the world offering your products and services. Your competition are all out there as well (or soon going to be) so you need to stay ahead of the game.

This is where online marketing comes into play – a little bit of love for your website will help it exceed expectations and be a valuable asset.

So, how do you do it? SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. Now, you may have just cringed when I said that – there are so many myths going around about it, scare stories and confusion.

What it boils down to is ensuring your website appears as close to the top of the results pages in a search engine for a users search term.
In reality, very few people will ever access your website directly by typing your full web address into their computer – but will use a search engine (like Google, Bing or Yahoo) to search for your brand name, or even just a product or service you might sell.

The search engine will then present the user with what it thinks are the most relevant results for that search query. Therefore, it’s important that you let search engines know what search terms your site would be a good match for, and the search engine will work out how good a match.

• Having great, well written, regularly updated content on your site
• Correct ‘semantic markup’ – that’s how your pages are coded. You’ll never see this, but all-important search engines will and making their lives easier can only be a good thing.
• Links back to your site from others – the bigger the site linking back to you the better

There’s a lot of factors behind SEO, but get these three right and you’re going to do yourself a lot of favours.

SEO isn’t a quick fix or easy answer, it will take a bit of time, however it’s more a case of thinking differently rather than learning new skills or baffling yourself with new information.

What you can do to help your own SEO…

• Keep in mind the sort of terms users would be searching for that would apply to your site and use them throughout your website
• When adding pages, make sure the content’s easily readable, contains these key terms (and variations of them) and is really informative and useful
• When writing content, link key phrases and words in it to relevant pages of your site
• If your website platform allows you to, include these key phrases in page titles, meta descriptions and keywords. These are generally able to be set on a per-page basis and this feature should be part of your initial spec list.

Getting the basics right yourself isn’t difficult, however if you have a website already that’s not quite hitting the mark or your site just needs a bit of a refresh and some TLC come and talk to us.

We’re able to help improve your existing web presence by improving your site structure, helping you pick a keyword list and managing the implementation of your SEO strategy.

H1 Design will even provide reporting so you can see who’s using your website – how many visitors you get, where they’re located and what they do on your website. This allows you to see real business benefits to all the work we carry out.

Using this information as well as our marketing knowledge and experience, we can help turn around your online presence and ensure your website is a valuable business asset.

A couple of sites we’ve been working on lately are Turtlegates – Expanding Safety Barriers and Permatex – Automotive and Industrial Adhesives.

Jamie Sterling – H1 Design

Focus on..., Marketing, Online, Search, SEO