I thought I would just do a quick blog post on a few search engine optimisation (SEO) tips.
I was being asked today by someone that called me to explain how SEO works and they were telling me they had done everything for their site to get it to number 1 on Google. In fact they weren’t even being found on Page 1 of Google for their major key term and on top of the website looked a bit of a mess. There was one major flaw in this callers plan and one that I see often and spotted immediately…they hadn’t used their keyword in their page text or title. They were a Cambridge company and had widely used the term Cambridge alongside their business industry name but what they were desperate to be found for was Cambridgeshire but this wasn’t on their website anywhere! Don’t be fooled by thinking that search engines will naturally assume they know what you want, the Google bots at times can be very accurate indeed so if you want to be found for a certain key term then make sure it is in there. Of course don’t forget to have done the keyword research first but that’s another story. Even easier just contact RAD SEO and get us to do it all for you.
Sometimes if you really intend to ‘do business’ online it really is worth investing a little money in some web design or if you really do have the skills then do something yourself but don’t just bodge a website together just to get it done quickly and at no cost. A simple design can cost just a few hundred pounds, tools like wordpress.org are great for having a managed back end system that is easy to use. Most important if you are driving visitors to your website then they need a good landing page to keep them there and fulfill their objectives. At RAD SEO SEO Cambridge if you do not have a website we are happy to discuss creating something for you and design it so that the search engines like it.
Anyway back to the SEO tips, here’s a few to be getting on with.
- Do not purchase a new domain unless you have to.
- Research your keyword phrases extensively.
- Optimise your site for your target audience, not for the search engines.
- Design and categorise your site architecture and navigation based on your keyword research.
- Program your site to be “crawler-friendly.”
- Label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (aka alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as possible.
- Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market’s needs, and make sure it’s copy that the search engines can “see.”
- Incorporate your keyword phrases into each page’s unique Title tag
- Make sure your site is “link-worthy.”
- Don’t be married to any one keyword phrase or worried too much about rankings early on.
