It’s a ‘tale as old as time’ – beauty is only skin deep. But it’s not just a fairy-tale or a Disney movie, what’s beneath really does count. You probably don’t realise but you come across this analogy every day when searching on the internet. A well-designed and stunning website amounts to nothing if it cannot be found and this is all down to the detail behind the pages. This is where you need to optimise the website and a good SEO campaign can deliver the results.

Don’t get carried away with a good looking website

It’s an exciting time when you create your new website – the possibilities are endless. Whether it’s to launch your business or to reinvigorate your existing brand, importance is placed on the look of the website as it’s your shop window. But it’s crucial to ensure what’s behind the pages has substance and relevancy.

Work closely with your website development team to make sure they have a good understanding of your business. This ensures you will have the right keywords and Meta data in place to build on page optimisation. Utilising a strong keyword can see the business rank 1.5 positions higher* than with no keyword. Also, ask your development team to look at what can and cannot be seen because this will all affect your website’s rankings.

Ask yourself ‘is my website easy to navigate?’

Once someone has reached your website, information should be easy to navigate and quick to find to prevent people leaving as soon as they arrive. This is known as the ‘Bounce Rate’ or, as we like to refer to it, the ‘Miranda Hart Swoop’. Think of it like this, you go into a shop because it looks interesting and the window display is relevant. Then, only a few steps in the door you realise it’s not selling what you expected. This is where the right content is really important. Ultimately you want anyone looking at your website to find what they want, pronto.

Local web search

It’s also worth noting that 72% of consumers who do a local search visited a store within five miles** which is vital for businesses building up a service in a local community. Having an effective SEO campaign in place means that people can find you. An SEO expert can tailor a campaign to help build your website’s authority so you can reap the sales benefits.

SEO agency Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we’re well placed to to build your website on page optimisation. Call on 020 3137 1826 or saymoo@smart-cow.com.

Source: *Local SEO Guide, 2016, **WordStream, 2016

So your website is often the most visible face of your business. It’s where people generally go to first to find anything about you or your products and services.

Therefore it should be one of the top imperatives to make sure that people can find you when they search online. If you were to have a shop you would like this to be on the high street or shopping Centre and not stuck away in a back alley with little footfall.

That is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is so important, it is the aspect of your website that affects the virtual footfall to your site. Many businesses realise this, however, take short cuts to make it happen.

You need to create your footfall through quality methods or your site will not get the visits and can actually be detrimentally affected by your good intentions.

Linking Quality vs Quality

Linking to your site is one of the most compelling ways to persuade the search engines that your site is worth visiting. As in the real world if you had a lot of people tell you to try out a certain restaurant or shop you would be more inclined.

So it is only natural that a business owner should get as many link (or recommendation) to point to their site to get this validation. However as with the real world you would only trust these links if you respect them. If some Friends or work colleagues that you really respect recommend a product you may well investigate further, however, if some random person coming to you on the street you would not trust this and may even be put off.

Even more so if the random person was clearly unfit and drunk and recommending a certain gym or ladies clothes shop you may even be put of that store through this poor marketing. The same is true in the virtual world, the better the link the more likely you are to get the search engine to point to you. The poor links and you may well be put off. So first point is to only get good quality links.

Nothing

So you’ve got a website, why do anything else? If people are going to find you they are going to find you. Well whether it is a visitor or a search engine, they both need to know you are still trading and are an expert in your field.

Make sure you update your site frequently, add new blogs, images, links and content to make sure you are up to date. Take pride in yourself and you will be well respected. Real world example is the local store that has the same look, day after day, month after month, year after year. Yes, they have a consistent look, but is there anything to entice you in. Once you are in are you sure the stock is fresh and up to date, possibly not.

Copied content

Why reinvent the wheel? Well we are not asking for that we are just asking for something that you have created. Copied content is the internet’s version of fake Nike shoes, they may look good to start with, but it is a poor unoriginal copy. The search engines see this and ensure that the credit goes to the original work and clamp down on promoted copied content.

Poor meta descriptions

Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean that they don’t count. The meta descriptions are ways to assist the search engines to understand what the page is all about. They can also provide the valuable first few lined in a search result listing. So if you don’t want to let people and search engines know what your page is about feel free to leave these out.

Keyword Stuffing

If we were to write an article about keyword stuffing and just mentioned nothing but keyword stuffing in the keyword stuffing article, you’d think the search engine world see the keywords stuffed and promote the keyword stuffing article for the keyword “keyword stuffing” but by writing keywo…..   You get the point it is boring to you and google and what’s more you both feel cheated by being tricked to read a rather pointless article and so will be penalised.

Not allowing your site to be crawled

Websites have files in place that tell the search engines what to look at and what to ignore, this is very useful to prevent pages and pages of irrelevant code and source from being read as content to your site. However if you have “Disallow:/” set in this file you are directing the search engine to ignore you completely, make sure that this is not the case.

Broken links

Broken links in your site can have a detrimental effect on your sites performance. Just because a page is not there you may think is not that big a deal, however these pages can be bookmarked and would provide a poor customer experience. The search engines also get confused if you point them to a page that does not exists, how frustrating, minus one brownie point for you.

Not set up for local search

Great your business has a website, for the vast majority of people they may also want to visit you’re store or premises. So to make sure that you are set up for local search use a tool such as Moz Local this can check to see how consistent and what your local listings are, so in Yell, Facebook etc for a business like ours based in Purley, Croydon we ensure that for all the local search directories we have a consistent address and post code point to us.

SEO Marketing

If you need support with your SEO marketing, get in touch with our digital marketing team.

Brainstorming for keywords is about generating the root for different keyword ideas. You will need these keywords to assist with your online marketing campaign. Make sure you keep the content within your site real and not just stuck with keywords that you think the search engines might like, doing this is just looking for trouble.

Below is some advice on how to find keywords for your online marketing campaign.

These keywords are to be used in Google Adword keywords tool or any other keyword research tools in order to get additional ideas and select the keywords intended to target the website niche.

There are different ways and methods for brainstorming in order to generate keyword ideas such as:

1. Look Around. The items you see in your room, on your desk or anywhere else within your view can be the source of great keyword ideas.
2. Watch Television. Write down names of Television shows, items you see during a Television show and many more.
3. Go Shopping. Stores hold thousands of items that could be a root keyword. When you look at items, don’t write down the name of the item only but you also should note down the generic item.
4. Use Google Trends. If you can’t think of anything, go to Google Trends and see what the people are looking for right now.
5. Use Affiliate Networks. If you have no good ideas, check any affiliate network such as: Clickbank, Commission Junction and many more then check the products and find the relevant keywords that are usually written in descriptions of any product.
6. Go to Library. Titles of Books are considered to be a perfect method to find ideas for your niche. Actually, the obscure section in any library must be a big online niche. The library doesn’t have enough room to add books for all niches that you can fine online.
7. Look for long tail keywords. Head keywords are considered to be the most popular searched item, such as “shoe” this however only takes up a small percentage of total searches the majority being long tail and specific searches such as “find a brown leather shoe in Croydon” so look for specific long tail keywords.

Once you’ve found your keywords you can use this as the basis of your marketing campaigns however do not under any circumstances abuse this.You will be clearly found out for any keyword stuffing and penalised accordingly.

Add content often to your site however make sure it is always relevant to your target audience and always worded with their interest in mind and through your own sites personality.

This is just one of many ways you can optimise your website. It’s important that you understand why optimising your website is key when it comes to the growth of your business.

Good luck and happy marketing.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

Make sure your webpages have relevant and appropriate names. Some CMS systems provide generic numbers from the names of pages on blogs, however they also allow an override to create a more human readable name.

It doesn’t only make it easier for humans to read but also helps the search engines to understand what the page is about. This also is useful when compiling a long list of links, such that readers can choose their web destination efficiently.

URL

Each page within your site must have a unique address which is its Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The URL can be domain name followed by the extension.

When any visitor types your own domain name, the visitor will be directed mainly to your index file that is uploaded in your website contents where the letters after the dot to the right of “index” refer to the technology used during implementation process to create the page.

Within the content behind each page there are lots of meta tags that website owner can add to their website. Some tags are great for managing your pages and other tags are used to provide data for external programs such as servers, web browsers and robots.

Website management meta tags are mostly used by the people working on the site. While these tags may be important for your visitors and customers, they are actually more important for website owner and editors who are working on the website.

Meta tags

The more common meta tags used within a web page are the description and keyword meta tags:

Description: the meta tag description provides the search engine more than understanding about what your pages about. It also can be shown up in the search engine results to assist the reader to whether the page is relevant to their search criteria.

Keywords

Keywords: the keyword meta tag is not used within Google and only lightly used in other search engines. This used to be used to assist search engines in what the content was about however after being abused for so long there is little relevancy to put onto it. Some developers do not even use this tool as it might give away their “secrets” of the keywords that they are creating online marketing campaigns against.
We hope that this is of use are you and welcome any comments.

Happy online marketing from Smart Cow.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.