GCP Web Designs:- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

With so many people using search engines, it is no longer enough to simply put your business online-it is also necessary to put it at the top of that search engine and this is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is useful. SEO combines key skills and internet know-how to put your website as high up on the search engine results as possible and although there are no specific rules on how to achieve this, with a combination of good techniques and good web content, you should be able to achieve a satisfactory position for your site. Here I am going to show you how.

As an example, let’s say that you are a customer wishing to set up a business selling dining room furniture.

Key words in both the title of your company and the body of the text should help with this. For example, if someone were to want dining room furniture, it will be useful if your company includes the word furniture in the title part of the page (this does not necessarily mean your company’s name, but the words included above the body of the text: ‘Home’, ‘About Us’ etc...). Secondly putting key words in larger fonts (headings for example) in the body of the website, allows the search engine to pick these up quicker. There should be a limit of around five key words in the body of the text and these should be repeated around three times. It is also possible to put key words in the coding of the website; however this should be down to the web developer and not necessarily the customer to provide.

It is also advisable to think of a good URL which includes what the website sells/is about (e.g.; diningroomfurniture.co.uk). If the site is for a UK based company it is better to use ‘.co.uk’ as search engines have the choice for the consumer to search pages from the UK only, and if your URL is ‘.com’ it is less likely to appear at the top.

However, with thousands of websites being added to the internet, it is becoming increasingly harder to rank yourself highly with just good coding and good content. There is always the option to pay for your website to be ranked highly on the search engine, however, this is an expensive way of doing so as it is necessary to constantly outbid your competitors and many viewers tend to overlook these as they are in different colours and view them as an advertisement. A free alternative is to link your website from as many high-ranking websites as possible, such as Facebook, Twitter or You Tube. You can do this by setting up a group on the above and having a ‘Find Us On...’ button on your website that links the viewer to that group.

It is also advisable to get as many people as possible to click on the link to your website. Sending an email or message to your family and friends asking to view your website means that it gets further and further up the search engine results. Another option is to register your website with the most popular search engines. You can do this for free by simply visiting the search engine and typing in ‘add URL to (name of search engine)’ and following the instructions.

Lastly, search engines are constantly ‘looking’ through the content of the internet for new websites and old websites with new content. You should therefore try to refresh the content of your website every six to twelve months so that the site does not lay dormant; this then makes the search engine put the site higher up.