Why you absolutely positively must optimise your website

Posted: 17/10/2014 7:43:00 AM. | By: Kev Seeley

There are a few owners of websites who feel that it is ok to simply have an online presence. But if you've paid for the construction and hosting of a site, why not finish the project and market it properly? With a little effort, the results and returns can be astounding.

It doesn't matter what your business is. Whether you're selling products online with a shopping cart or just promoting your own brand or services, there's plenty of scope for improvement. While some may think that search engine optimisation is a waste of their valuable resources, this could not be further from the truth.

Search Engine Optimisation isn't just vital, it is essential. Unless your business is absolutely unique, the number of websites targeting the same markets as yours is increasing on an almost daily basis. A targeted SEO stratgey can help you stand out from that crowd.

You created your website to generate business awareness or income, preferably getting traffic from people who are most likely to be immediately looking for what you are offering. This is the traffic that is provided by the search engines.

Google, Yahoo and Bing cater for the vast bulk of all searches. People naturally use these search engines to find what they are looking for. With more people able to access the internet with more devices, including tablets and mobile phones, the number of people using these search engines is getting larger every day.

Their search results are returned using complex and constantly changing algorithms. Websites are first indexed by a spider or bot, which crawls through a sites content finding information and determining the sites domain or page authority. They then create a site list and link those sites to a relevant search phrase, ranked by what they see as the content that will be most useful to the searcher. They are looking for highly targeted information, which is why you need good SEO.

For example, a site's strength is largely determined by its incoming link structure. Each link is ranked on authority so the more you have, the more authoritative you appear. But all links are not created equal! Stronger links will have a much larger impact so you should start being selective and looking for sites with a higher page rank. However, page rank is only one metric in determining a site's strength.

Relevance is even more important. You want to source links that are from people or businesses within your industry, from your surrounding area or who share a common thread. These will also be seen as a more respected source by the search engines and by other web-savvy users.

The domains your links are coming from can also have a profound effect on your sites perceived authority. If you get a trackback or link from a site with a .gov or .edu domain, these will have a greater influence than dozens of equivalent low PR links.

What about your content?. Not only your page copy, which is really vital, but your meta content as well. Getting the little bits right can make a vast difference to how the search engines view your site. It is not that hard to put together a unique block of content for each page on your site. It needn't be too long either. Generally, page copy should be around 200 to 500 words but if you really don't have time to write more, less content may still be OK. Just make sure any content is relevant and provides useful information to your target market.

This is another way to prove your sites relevance. While good quality inbound links show strength, well written content will allow the search engine spiders to get a clear indication of what phrases or words you are targeting. So please ensure that every page is optimised for your keywords by including them a couple of times within your text, especially inside the H1 heading tag as well as your page title.

There are other factors such as your sites internal link structure, how fast your site loads and the other things that you should be providing for the benefit of your potential customers. Search engines love websites that are user friendly, so by optimising your site for Google, Bing and Yahoo you will also be optimising your site for your human visitors as well.

Creating your website without incorporating at least some of the points mentioned above could be a major mistake and will certainly leave you without a good, and hopefully growing, stream of highly targeted traffic.Building a website is only the start, so make sure you finish the task and get it optimised for visitors and search engines.

BlueBay Solutions offers search engine optimisation services with a performance gaurantee as well as website optimisation services.

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