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Search & Website Optimisation
Optimising your website for big search engines including Google, Bing & Yahoo is an essential part of modern website development. There are many different aspects to optimising websites for search, and there is alot you need to do yourself too particularly if you have a small budget. Here is an overview of just some of the things needed to optimise your website.
With a world currently in energy saving mode reducing the carbon footprint, search engines are encouraging us to do the same with websites by making our websites quicker to download. There are a number of tasks required to achieve a quick website and they include optimised photographs to the correct size and type, correct server side header information and compression, the latest technologies and upates applied to your site, and clean, concise server side code. If your site is slow, it's not optimised for search!
Carefully choosing keywords to change how search engines deliver your website is an important step. To accurately predict the phrases and keywords your customers will use you do need to investigate how your existing customers found you, but you also need to analyse your potential customers and how they search. Selecting the wrong keywords could seriously affect your search engine performance. People generally search by product type, area (largest first such as Scotland, Argyll, Loch Fyne, Kintyre, Campbeltown etc).
Whilst only around for a few years, social networking has exploded into one of the most controversial but important tools for business. A presence on Facebook for business, Twitter and Google+ are the three main social networking sites, along with Myspace that continues to be popular with musicians. We recommend setting up your social profiles on these websites and contributing on at least a weekly basis, it will also help you with your creativity and business thinking.
Links from other websites are important. Normally a link from a website at the number one spot on a Google search will provide much more 'link juice' to your website than the number two spot, this is why websites at the top of Google charge high rates for advertising (not only do they get 3 times as much traffic as the number 2 website, but they are also more valuable). On top of that you need to do your research and set-up links with similar businesses, regional websites and more. One way of creating inbound links is blogging.
If you cannot be seen you won't get the visitors. It takes a small investment in advertising and marketing to be able to make sure your business is seen, once you start generating more web visitors your natural search engine ranking will improve. By creating adverts on high performing relevant websites in your region, sending email newsletters and using advertising programmes such as Google Adwords you can increase your visibility, visitor numbers to your site, and your potential income.
If your competitor website is performing much better than yours the first step in creating an optimisation strategy is to analyse theirs and try to establish why they are successful, is it their branding, colour scheme, website design or layout, keyword terms, domain name phrase, link strategy or advertising? Looking at all these things will provide a good amount of information and help you to understand and develop a new optimisation strategy. We, of course, can help with this.
There are a number of other elements including web directories, search engine submission, visitor statistics analysis and webmaster tool monitoring that need to be done on an ongoing basis to be able to advise on any changes, make urgent amendments, and be proactive in keeping your website performing well.
We are able to provide all these services and more as part of our search and website optimisation services with a maintenance contract available to suit your website portfolio maintaining it through the lifetime of its service.
Please contact us to discuss anything in particular.
