If you have a website, you may have come across the term search engine optimisation. This is the process by which the information hidden behind your website is altered so search engines like Google and Yahoo can find you. Doing this makes it easier for potential customers to find your website when they search for your services online.
Many businesses put a lot of emphasis into search engine optimisation (or SEO). This is a good thing, but this focus will bring businesses into contact with firms that claim they can make your website appear on page 1 of Google or increase traffic to your website with a monthly fee. These people are misleading you. Let me explain why.
How do search engines work?
Search engine websites like http://www.google.co.uk or http://www.yahoo.co.uk use and store many billions of information records about the all the websites on the internet. This information is to work out what results to show you when you type in a search term. These data records are collected by the search engine through software called “web crawlers”. Only the search engine company has control over how these crawlers look at your website. They employ complex calculations to then show the results of a search on their website based on the information collected.
Only the search engine provider can control how and where your website is displayed in the search results. No one company can manipulate these results or guarantee where you will appear. Some companies have tried in the past, but this causes the website to get blacklisted on the search engine results (sometimes up to 2 years) which makes things even worse. See the Google vs BMW case.
Even if a search engine provider could manipulate results so you do appear high up the results, you cannot guarantee another company in the similar line of business doing the same and beating your result ranking.
What can you do to improve your search result rankings?
While you cannot guarantee where you will appear on the results of a search engine, there are things that can be done to make your website more appealing to the web crawlers. This ensures the search engine gets as much data about your website as possible, giving you the best chance of someone finding your website in the search results.
The top tips to help your website include:
- Modify the website code so that a description and title of your business in shown in the title of each page
- Add code into your website that lists related keywords and descriptions to your business
- Modify the website so that important text headers read correctly and are not in image format
- Check for spelling mistakes within the copy of the website
- Use important keywords in your content across the website
- If you have a large site, use a Site Map written in a special XML format
- Try and get other websites to link to you; this will increase the number of visitors that come to your website which highlights to Google the importance of your business
At Productive Inbox, we always employ these techniques and more in our web design work to help improve your chances of getting your website online. We can also implement these features onto existing websites. If you would like us to review your existing website and to improve your rankings on search engines then contact us for a friendly informal chat and a one-off quote with our recommendations.
