Search Engine Optimisation

Are you getting the SEO Services you are paying for?

Many SEO companies are charging for submitting your website to Google and charging a monthly fee for search engine optimisation, but are you getting the service you are paying for?  If a company is trying to charge you for submitting your website to Google, then please bear in mind this is free and very easy to do. Google will often find websites without formal submission anyway when it follows your link from other websites.  Here is a quick guide so you can check your website to see if it is well optimised.

How well is my website optimised for Search Engines, e.g. Google?

The first thing to remember is that Google is not a real person and it can only make assumptions about the content of your website based on what you "tell it".

Google assigns importance to certain parts of a webpage so you need to make sure that you also assign importance to these same areas of your webpage.  Think of it as if you are populating road signs, you don't want to be pointing drivers vaguely to a back street in the middle of nowhere when you need them to find an important landmark!

So where are some of the road signs on your website?

• Page title
• Filename
• Bold keywords
• Keywords in your content
• Links with relevant anchor text 
• Alt tags

Page titles are the text that appears in the very top of your browser window, these should be no more than 70 characters in length, but should contain meaningful keywords relevant to your page, your most important key phrases should be at the FRONT of the page title.

Filename - this is the name of your page, on this page the filename is "search-engine-optimisation.html". When planning a website it's important to use relevant filenames as they are a strong indicator to Google as to what the page is about.

Bold keywords are also denoted as important by search engines such as Google, this is another good way to show Google which phrases are important.

Alt text should be used to describe an image, using good but relevant keywords.  The alt attribute is used to specify text to describe an image and is primarily for users of screen readers, language translation applications, etc.  For example, a website advertising "holiday caravan rental in Great Yarmouth" should use the alt text "Caravan, Great Yarmouth" rather than simply "Caravan", therefore Google and non-visual readers are given precise information about the image.  This is often one of the most under-utilised opportunities for search engine optimisation.

Links with relevant anchor text - links are highly important and external backlinks are said to account for about 70% of how well a website performs in Google.  Backlinks are a strong indicator of how other people regard your website and Google relies heavily on this metric.  Because of the strong reliance on backlinks as a website quality indicator, Google frowns upon any unnatural acquisition of backlinks, e.g. paid links.  Any SEO company that sells its services based on getting you hundreds of new backlinks a month should be regarded with caution.  The best way to get backlinks is to include quality content on your website that is likely to be shared with others.  You can also run competitions whereby you ask customers to blog about your services and include a backlink.  Getting quality backlinks is difficult, but it is much better to take a long-term approach, if Google sees a website buying links then it may take steps to penalise the site.  You should also link internally between different pages and not just via the basic menus and navigational structure.  If you write some text on one page, include a link to another page within the text and use relevant anchor text.  This helps send further signals to Google as to what keywords the linked-to page should be associated with.  When you gain external links, if you have any control over the anchor text, think carefully about relevancy.

A note about Headings

H1, H2, H3 headings. etc. are headings on your page. They used to be important to search engines but these days are less important. However, it is still good practice from a readability point of view to break text up into sections with clear headings. You can check which headings have been set as H1, etc. by clicking View > Source in your browser window and then looking at the code behind the page, check which text has been enclosed in <H1>text</H1>, etc.

Content is King

When reading your webpages, think about the keywords that you would expect prospective customers to type into Google to find the services and/or products you offer.  Are you featuring these phrases/keywords in your content in the exact way that you think they will be entered into Google?  For example, someone might type into Google, "Find me a new house" and you might have "We build new houses" in your content.  Google is not clever enough to know that what you are offering may match the customer's needs so you need to include some "search specific" terms in your content.  There are several tools you can use to find out the kind of terms people are using in their searches.  It is often a good idea to ask someone else to read text on your website to check it makes sense and isn't over-stuffed with keywords, there needs to be a careful balance of well optimised but readable text.

There are many other ways to promote a website but getting these key things right can make a big difference to how your website performs in Google.

There are often many hidden issues with websites which make them underperform, e.g. duplicate content, but you would need a full site review to check for all of the possible issues.