We don’t need to go into great detail here, but understanding the fundamentals will help.
For non-tech people (and even the pro’s on occasion) SEO can be difficult to follow at the best of times. I don’t want to bore you with every detail about SEO, but I do want to help you build an understanding of the fundamentals to take away for your next project.
Let’s get started:
1. Technical SEO
This is the part of SEO that ensures your website is put together so that search engines like Google can crawl and index your websites content. As part of this I would include things like setting your website up with an SSL certificate to get your website secure over HTTPS, and optimising the speed of your website. The latter is especially important these days with mobile on the takeover.
2. On-Page SEO
The on-page SEO is where the optimisation takes place to help users and Google understand all about your business and the services you provide to maximise the clicks from search engines. This work is all carried out directly on your website and is embedded within your code. You can start with things like page titles and meta descriptions, but it can also go a lot deeper. There are many important factors with on-page SEO but thankfully there is a plethora of information online to get you started.
This step is crucial and cannot be ignored, and is often missed by low budget SEO service providers. If you order an SEO service and they don’t ask for a login to your website then cancel your contract immediately!
3. Content Optimisation
CONTENT IS KEY! This is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in the SEO world and for good reason. Your content is very important and will in most cases need to be improved not just for your customers, but optimised in a way that Google understands too. It’s difficult to master but a good rule of thumb is to be thorough without waffle and not spam your keywords.
For example an introduction to your website that reads like this isn’t going to be great for your customers:
“YellowRoad designs is a web design company that offers web design services. We have delivered web design for many companies’ websites providing web design services over a number of years.”
It’s full of keywords and may have worked in 1999 but that isn’t going to fool Google. Your customers will click off faster than an interrupted teenager in their bedroom.
4. Content Development
Sometimes you will need to create new content. This could be new separate pages for your services, a chance to go a little deeper into your offering, different office locations, or even your portfolio of previous work perhaps. Remembering that content is key!
5. Local SEO
Local SEO is all about the process of optimisation (we love that word) for your website to rank in your local area for specific search terms like Web design Milton Keynes. This includes creating a well worked Google My Business listing, changes to the site and also work on external sites. A juicy part of local SEO is citations.
6. Building Authority & Trust
Lots of business battle for search results and those on page #1 are investing time and money consistently to stay there. Building authority and trust is a hugely important factor. This is mainly done through building links to your website from other relevant sites. Say a mechanic ran a garage working on BMW cars and BMW posted a blog topic about this mechanic and linked to his website, then the mechanics website will be seen by Google as a site that can be trusted a little more. If the mechanic got a number of links like this when his ranking would surely improve. This has been the way from the start and I doubt it will ever change. This sounds simple, right? You just need lots of great links, no problem… Well this is actually one of the hardest and most time consuming elements of SEO. You can’t just get links from anywhere as these are considered spam by Google. Your website will get penalised and either knocked down the ranking, or completely removed. You can’t buy them for the same reason. You have to build them carefully. One of the more common ways is right helpful content like this on another websites blog (guest posting) and as a thankful they may credit you and your website with a link.
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