Search Engine Optimisation

Business owners don’t understand that, to get such a high ranking requires time and patience, and that spending even a modest budget might be required. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the term given to a set of practices that help your website achieve good organic search engine results. It’s the practice that takes time, patience and some knowledge of how search engines work.

The term SEO is often used interchangeably with Search Engine Marketing (SEM). However, SEM is a different type of service involving an advertising budget which is normally spent on pay per click (PPC), and may also include some more sophisticated SEO activities.

How SEO Works

The relevance of the content on the page to what is being searched is very important for SEO. So if your business is promoting football jerseys, for example, it needs not only to reference that, but also the type e.g. Kerry GAA football jerseys. Remember not to irritate readers with excessive repetition, however.

Search engine ‘spiders’ will identify what is being searched, along with a number of other features including what is termed ‘metadata’. The two most important pieces of metadata are:

Page title: The first line you see on a search engine results page. This is picked up by the search engine from a line in the website’s code.

Description: The line below the title on a search engine results page. This is also found in the website’s code.

There are a range of other factors that search engines will use to prioritise the results that they deliver to users who put a phrase into a search engine. They include:

Having an automatically generated and machine-readable sitemap in a format compatible with major search engines.

Using human-readable URLs.

Using SEO-friendly URLs that can be edited to maximise their SEO effectiveness.

Also, the key metadata of pages (for example, the HTML title, description and keywords) must be editable independently of each other, and of all other page elements (for example, the headline and navigation label). Webmaster tools, such as Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, must be configured for the site.

How to get started ?

There are a number of factors to consider to improve your website’s SEO:

Keyword research and analysis: Identify up to five primary keywords your website could use, taking your top-ranking competitors’ websites as inspiration. Use Google Keyword Planner to help identify these keywords.

On-page optimisation: This concerns HTML, the standard mark-up language that lets you create Web pages. The construction of your page will determine the page’s ranking e.g. URL construction should match primary keywords, H1 tags should use top three keywords, you should use internal links and ALT tags, etc.

Technical configuration: This involves ensuring your server is based in the right area (e.g. Irish businesses targeting Irish customers using Irish servers), your website’s load time, among other factors.

Off-page optimisation: Generating high-quality, inbound links to your website is key here. This is done through blog and PR activities, as well as targeted social media activity. The key is to get people to link to your website.

SEO techniques

On-page SEO has everything to do with elements on your own website. In-page SEO includes technical SEO - the quality of your code - text and visual content and user-friendliness on your site.

Off-page SEO aims to get more links to the site. The more relevant the links the site has, the higher the rankings in Google it will get. Other off-page methods are links from social media and brand mentions. We will gladly help you with your link structure!

Local SEO Get visibility in Google Maps. This is good for local companies who want to be seen in the immediate area. To get visibility in Google Maps, we use something called structured data. This can also be used to get e.g. stars (reviews) in the search results.

Technical SEO: We make sure that everything is technically correct. Some factors that are crucial:

Secure website using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate with correct redirects
Site speed
Optimisation for mobile
Page loading and stay algorithms

SEO key areas of local positioning

1. Location of the website

"Site localization" means providing the name of the city, province or region throughout the entire website. For companies with multiple locations, this may require creating separate pages or hubs for individual locations. Other tactics also include engaging in community events and presenting articles and information about them on the site.

2. Building business brand

It involves adding basic information about your company on business websites and (also local) industry catalogs. This will not only help customers find information about your business, but also by providing your company name, address, phone number and website URL (NAPW) on industry websites and adding additional information to your business catalogs, this will improve your search rankings.

3. Creating a Google My Business profile

The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked. "What's happened to me?" he thought.

4. Managing reviews and assessments.

Real reviews are very important both to show the quality of your service and to send signals to search engines that your website and services are trusted and useful. The number of reviews received, the overall quality of reviews, and the authority of the review sites themselves are important for local search rankings.

5. Acquiring good quality backlinks.

Naturally, the obtained return links from well-known websites help search engines recognize the site as a trusted source of information and increase the "meaning" aspect of the local search algorithm. Links from local newspapers, bloggers, industry companies and business associations, as well as business cards, can help and improve the visibility of the search.

NELSON WYLIE