NEWS » » Search Engine Optimisation

Whether your a freelance designer or design agency there are 3 letters that are going to be mentioned by your client at some point: SEO. Bury your head in the sand and ignore or follow some simple basic principles and good professional Search Engine Optimisation will ensure you get the audience your site deserves.

Google, Yahoo and Bing (formally Windows Live) are just three of the major search engines that internet users use to locate what they are looking for on the internet. Users that can’t find your site won’t be purchasing your goods or services – it’s that simple. Internet users, myself included are lazy - why trawl through thousands of pages looking for a company that you can’t remember the name of when there are hundreds and in some cases thousands of others being listed for you to choose from. If your company is not listed in the first 5 pages of the major search engines the chances are you’re going to be missed. Think of it like this: Imagine a high street where all the shops sell the same goods or services and the public have to go past numerous shops before they get to yours – it’s more than likely that they’d get enticed by the shops before yours.

One of the keys to successful SEO and having your site found, is keywords; words that users are likely to use when searching for your products or services. So if you sell Email Marketing and your service is called Boost then ‘Boost Email’,  ’Email Newsletters’ and ‘Email Campaigns’ would be good search phrases to include in your website copy. Ensuring your site is optimised with the correct keywords is the first step to improving your page position in search engines.

Try to ensure your copy writing is informative, easy to read and not overloaded with keywords – it has to make sense otherwise users will simply look to another better written site.

Keeping your content fresh and relevant is equally important as well as being unique: don’t duplicate areas elsewhere on your site and don’t even consider copying from other websites – as this can have heavy penalties on your site.

Equally important to achieve good search engine optimisation are:

• Writing relevant page titles – on all pages
• Ensure your meta tags are correct – (these are elements within the code that provide information about the page and its contents)
• Ensure the page heading markup is used in order of importance and contain the correct relevant keywords / phrases
• Use easily readable URL’s (web addresses) – eg. www.boostemail.co.uk/features.html
• Use stemming of keywords eg.  Stemming reduces words like ‘designing’, ‘designed’ and ‘designer’ to the root word, “design”
• Adding descriptions and titles to links and images
• Use plural, singular and versions of your keywords in different context
• Use industry standard clean markup to structure and code your web pages
• Submit a sitemap to the search engines – this helps them index your pages easily
• Keep your content and page styling elements separate by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Ultimately make your site as accessible and useable as possible - for users, browsers, devices and search engine robots

Search Engine Optimisation can be a long and drawn out task, involving in-depth research of your competitors, keyword analysis, traffic analysis and re-writing your copy; but with the correct approach and some clever thinking you can bring your site back from obscurity to being highly ranked; which could boost your sales no end.

If this all sounds interesting but you’d rather let someone else deal with it, then give us a call today.