What is SEO?

Firstly SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which, to you and I is, how to appear higher in the Google search results.

There Are 2 Different Types of SEO:

1. Offsite SEO and 2. Onsite SEO. Offsite SEO refers to all the things you can do outside of your website like link building and social media management and On-site SEO refers to anything you do within your site like page titles, keywords, meta descriptions, in-page content (content marketing) and loading speed.

So, what does Google want from your site? Google’s aim in life is to give the end user the best experience possible. It needs to make sure each user finds what they are looking for and finds it quickly. So, it needs to serve up relevant and up to date results.

When Google looks at your site it asks itself these questions:

1. What is your site about? What are the key words associated with it?
2. Does your site load fast and render correctly?
3. Is the content worth reading? Do people stay on your site for long and do they share what they read with others?
4. How up to date is the content?

Here’s how you can answer those questions effectively.

Offsite SEO

Get Inbound Links

An inbound link is when another website links to yours. The key here is to have as many popular and respectable sites, related to your business link to you as possible and heres why.

It’s important your links are from sites that are related or have complementary content to your own business as this will help google figure out what your site is all about. If you’re a financial adviser try and get sites that write about financial issues to link to you.

The more inbound links you have from sites that also have lots of links and that are deemed credible, the higher you’ll score with google.

I would avoid paying for links and being tempted by ‘link building networks’ as these are easily recognised by google as spam and you will be penalised for it. What I would suggest is spending a bit of time guest blogging for sites in your subject area so that you can get the link back.

Take Advantage of Social Media

Google has realised that if people are sharing your content on their profiles, that must mean you’re writing something worth reading and for that they will reward you by showing your pages higher up in their results.

If you want to gain social media likes and shares you need to keep your content fresh, and to achieve that make sure your content is at least one of these things:

• Informative
• Intriguing
• Funny

Avoid spamming your followers with news about your company, instead try and offer advice or do a bit of research and  that will really engage your visitors.

By all means promote your services, but do it after you’ve offered up a series of relevant and useful posts, as these will help build your credibility. Even then I would try and keep the office news and offers posts to a minimum.

Which social network should you be building a presence on?

• Facebook is good for B2C but is not so good for B2B
• LinkedIn is a great way for you to market yourself to your professional contacts
• Twitter is great for both B2C and B2B and is fast paced
• Pinterest is good if you have actual products to show off and is becoming popular with designers and fashion brands.
• Google+ is also popular with retailers as they can make the most of it’s large image sizes.

Keeping it Fresh – Content Marketing

Ok, so now you know the social media tools available, we need to focus on the what you’re going to post or tweet? You need good quality, fresh content on your area of expertise.

The content needs to be at least on of the following:

• Informative
• Intriguing
• Funny

Try and focus on a particular topic and write regular insightful posts that help other people. How To’s are great, recommendations, and Top Tips are all good ways of engaging people, and it’s also worth making sure your post or email etc, title is interesting and enticing so it sticks out and makes people want to open it.

There are two benefits to producing good quality content, firstly you will score higher on Google because you are naturally using your main key terms and terms related to your industry.

And secondly it will form part of a good content marketing strategy. Your quality, trust building content will demonstrate your expertise making people want to use you and recommend you.

More on using content marketing here.

Onsite SEO

This last one is a bit more technical. It’s all about the back end, of your site that is, and this is what people would normally get us to do:

• Ensuring all page codes are valid
• Making sure URLs have relevant key words
• Setting the right page title
• Giving all images ‘alt’ tags
• Using h1 paragraph tags properly in your copy
• making sure you have a fast page loading time

To round up, this all comes back to proving to Google that you provide and excellent user experience in terms of the content on your site and how it’s displayed.

So, make sure you’re super social, get lots of back-links, and have a fast loading site expertly coded and there will be nothing stopping you on your way to the top of Google.

If you need any help with expertly coding your site, please get in touch, we can help you out.