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SEO – it’s a process, not a technical solution

Posted: March 15th, 2010

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is used to help sites achieve a higher rank in the popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing!. There are many companies offering the service to clients (including us), but few explain, in layman’s terms exactly what SEO is and how it’s used. We’ve often met with clients who were under the impression that SEO was just part of the website building process. It isn’t, it’s something completely different .

This article will explain SEO clearly and highlight the differences between it and web development.

Why is SEO important for a website?

Nowadays conducting business on the web has become an important part of our lives. If you’re not taking advantage of the Internet for your business the chances are that you’re losing out to competitors that are. However, simply having a website isn’t enough. You need to ensure that people find your business when they’re searching for the products or services you provide.

This is where SEO comes in. It helps your site achieve a high ranking in search engine results pages. You can have the best website in the world, but if no-one knows about it, it’s not providing you with any value or business. Research shows that 70% of web users click on the natural listing, sometimes called organic listing, links in Google, rather than the paid for box style ads that appear down the right side of the page. You need ensure that each and every time a user searches on-line for something related to your business they see your site.

SEO – what it’s not

SEO isn’t a technical solution, it’s not a quick, simple fix. You don’t even need to be a web designer or developer in order to understand it (though it does help). There are many companies that offer guarantees to get you to the top of Google in 24 hours. This is not SEO either. SEO is not something you can switch on or off, nor is it something that can either be right or wrong. SEO cannot have a fixed end date. No, SEO is none of these things.

So what is SEO?

SEO is a process. It’s a combination of research, analysis, technical changes and promotional work. It’s an on-going series of investigations, adjustments and progression.

In order to achieve good results for your site and get it listed highly in the search engine rankings several things need to happen:

  1. Your site needs to identify and be relevant for the keywords or phrases that the users search for in relation to your business.
  2. Your site needs to be listed in the search engine’s index, if it’s not then it doesn’t matter how well it’s written or how much SEO has been done, you won’t show up.
  3. You need to be ‘trusted’ by the search engines, links back to your website from other websites indicate a level of trust to sites such as Google.
  4. Your site needs to be kept up to date, in order to ensure it remains relevant. If your competitor is offering more current and relevant information than you then they may be listed above you and you could lose business to them.

The SEO process takes all of these factors into account. Through research patterns can be identified and thus action can be taken and results achieved.

SEO is an on-going process

The main difference between website design/development and SEO is that SEO is an on-going process. When you request a quotation for a website to be designed you will usually specify a project deadline, a date by which the website will be completed and be live on the web. This is where the design project ends. SEO begins after this and carries on for as long as you need your website to bring in business for you.

SEO is a type of marketing, but it differs from traditional marketing methods because it’s not fixed term paid for advertising (though the main goal of SEO is to promote your site and get it noticed). Business owners sometimes have difficulty understanding this concept, because SEO can yield more business like advertising can. However, as mentioned earlier we want to use SEO to get your site listed in the organic links in Google, because 70% of web users click on these links rather than the paid for box advertisements.

It takes time and commitment

SEO requires a commitment from the site owner too. You need to spread the word about yourwebsite. Ensuring that your website appears on all of your printed material, emails and advertisements in the media is a no-brainer. In addition to this, posting on forums related to your business and making sure you include your website address in the post, contacting suppliers asking them to post a link on their site to yours and joining networking sites such as LinkedIn are good ways to promote your site and build trust with Google.

Monitoring your site’s hits and visitor trends
This is vitally important, but is often overlooked or ignored by smaller businesses. There is no point in paying for SEO services if you’re not monitoring the results. SEO servcies are geared towards attracting more business by increasing the visibility and the amount of hits your website gets from users. If you’re not monitoring the number of hits your site receives each month you will have no way of knowing whether you’re gaining any benefits.

Also, by monitoring the ways that users interact with sites you can identify areas that may need to be changed. For example, you’ve got your site ranked nice and highly in Google and the number of hits you’re now receiving is significantly more than before you had SEO services. By looking at your website statistics you discover that the page most users leave on when visiting your site is your prices page and you’re not gaining any additional enquiries or sales from your site. This pattern of events lets you know that something is wrong on that page. Your prices may be too high, or alternatively they may be too low (believe me I’ve seen this happen lots of times, businesses lose sales because their prices are too low and therefore do not appear to be of good enough quality for their potential buyers.).

Of course there are many more things that are considered and implemented by SEO service providers, but implementing the ones I’ve mentioned above will certainly help out any site. An SEO expert will stay on top of changes in web user usage and the changes that search engines themselves make to the algorithms they use to determine where sites should be listed in their results.

In conclusion

This article has hopefully given you a clearer understanding of where SEO services differ from web design services. If you would like to find out more about the SEO services we offer, you can visit our SEO Services page. Alternatively, you can email or call us to discuss your requirements.

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Posted in Marketing, SEO, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Things you should consider before building your website

Posted: September 9th, 2009

man-sitting-on-hill-thinking
It’s certainly true that a website, when built properly, can help your business massively. Not only is a website a source of information for customers, it can also attract new business enquiries and sales and serve as a 24/7 service.

However, like anything a website needs to be created and maintained in the correct way. To help you to decide what should and should not be included in your website we’ve put together a list of things that you need to consider before deciding that you should have a website built.

Determine the goal of the site

This is the most important thing you need to decide before you even contact a designer to build the site. You need to clearly identify what you want your website to achieve. For example, do you want to sell products online or do you simply want to advertise products? Do you want the site to increase business for you or do you want it to serve as an information source for existing customers?
Once you have your goal you can begin to build a list of sections (links) that you need to include on your site. For example, a home page, a contact page, a products page, a services page etc. Jot them down on paper, a visual representation is far easier to work with than trying to keep it all in your head. These sections will form the building blocks of your site with all other content deriving from them so it’s important you include everything you need to in order for your site to achieve it’s goal.

How often will the site need updating?

Some sites don’t need updating very often at all, whilst others need to be updated every day. You should consider this factor when thinking about your own site.

Who will update the site?
Often if you don’t need to update your site regularly it will be more cost effective to have your site updated by the person/company that built it and will also save you time. However, if you need to update the site regularly then you will benefit from having your site built with a Content Management System (CMS) included. Content Management Systems allow non-technical users to add, edit and delete content from a site quickly and easily. In addition to text content you can often add mulimedia assets such as images, photo galleries and video links to your site too (with no coding knowledge).

Content Management Systems can save you money
Initially a site with a Content Management System included will cost you more money than a site without, but over time it will be more cost effective for you as you won’t have to keep paying interim charges to the site desgin company for updating your site.

Choosing a domain name

A domain name is your website address. It’s the www. bit. It’s something every website needs and it’s important you choose the right one. Most businesses usually use the name of their business as the address, although sometimes this is not possible and so an alternative has to be chosen.

Here are some tips for choosing a good domain name:

  • Don’t choose long names that are too long – as well as being a bind to type in you may also find that fitting the domain name onto your letterheads and other stationary becomes difficult due to the length.
  • Don’t include words that people often mis-spell – an example of this is the word veterinary. I used to mis-spell this all the time until I actually worked within the veterinary industry as a web designer. It would be far better to use the words vet or vets in your domain name
  • Choose a domain that’s right for the markets you sell to – if you only provide services to the uk choose a .co.uk domain name, if you sell internationally then .com is better suited
  • You can have more than one domain name pointing to the same website
  • If someone has a domain name that you really need they may be willing to sell it to you. You can contact them to discuss this matter, just be prepared to pay for it

Choosing a corporate identity for your site with colours

Quite often your company will have it’s own corporate colour scheme and these can be included in the design of your site. If you want to proceed in this manner you should provide your website designer with existing business literature (preferably in some form of electronic format) to enable them to sample the colours and use them in your site. This is a good idea when you want to maintain a consistent look to your branding.

However, sometimes you may need to choose different colours than the ones you use for your business, for example, if the website is a sideline business or you’re expanding the services you’re offering by introducing new products, for example you may be a company that primarily provides bathroom suites, but have decided to branch out into heating products too. In this example you would need a different colour scheme for the website that showcases your heating products than you would on a website that showcases your bathroom suites. You shouldn’t be afraid of allowing your website designer some creative freedom once you’ve decided the time is right for your website to be built. A good web design company will discuss this in-depth with you (and preferably face-to-face) in order to get a good understanding of what you need and will present you with draft designs before agreeing upon a final design.

Final Note

Hopefully you’ll now have a better understanding of the factors you need to consider before you have your website designed and built. We’ll be providing more articles in the future about things to consider once your site is built. Thanks for reading.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »