Give your website the best chance of being found (wefinda guide to SEO)

Without SEO, your web site is an interesting piece of information that you have posted on the web in the hope that someone may stumble on it. With SEO, your web site is a living breathing being, jockeying for top spot with the other web savvy companies and bringing in new business to you.

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the way you get your web site noticed by the web crawlers who rank web sites in order. Of course, if every site had great SEO then it would be impossible to have everyone sharing top spot but a regular attention to your SEO, either by you or by an SEO specialist, can do wonders to your ranking and the likelihood of attracting new business. Whilst some SEO techniques are best left to the specialists, there are some fairly simple techniques that you can follow to improve your site’s ranking. So what could you look at to improve your SEO?

Content
In this context, content consists of the actual words and pictures that you put on your site. These can be broken down into:
> Key words - identification. Keywords are the ways in which the web crawlers pick up and understand what your site is about. So, for example, if you make and sell gates then your key words might include “gates, garden gates, electronic gates, wrought iron gates” etcetera. Start by trying to think of all the words that your clients might use to search for your products. Then use a search engine, such as Google AdWords, to check how many times the words are actually used in searches and what other words or phrases you could use.
> Keywords – use. The keywords are used in two places. Firstly your web designer will use them in the web code as tags for the crawlers to pick up on. Secondly, you can use the key words in your script. However, be careful how many times you use the keywords and make sure they are relevant. If you have too high a keyword density, not only will the crawlers rank you lower, the content is likely to be stilted and your clients will be switched off.
> Pages. The crawlers look at each page separately. They don’t like copying so information repeated on different pages will count against you. However, using different key words on each page will help your ranking as will links between the pages.
> Words, pictures, videos. Whilst words are king, crawlers do look for other content and pictures and video will help the ranking. Conversely, complex diagrams tend to be ignored. Don’t copy content from other sites; duplication won’t get you any points.
> Changing content. Wipe out and replace all your content and you will shoot down the rankings. However, the crawlers like content which changes over time. Consider adding a weekly blog or news piece to your site. Make sure it is relevant to your business and if you are too busy or not a natural writer then contract a specialist writer to produce the blog for you.

Links
The crawlers love sites which are linked to others. However, the links have to be relevant. Randomly linking your site to thousands of others is known as black hat SEO, effectively an attempt to cheat. The crawlers will soon pick up on this and discount your site heavily. What you can do is:
> Link to another of your sites. So if you have a twitter, facebook or similar account then linking your posts to your main site is a bonus. For example you could blog about a new product on your main site, link this to a facebook advert and publicise via twitter. You could even post a video on you tube and link that with your site.
> Link to local and trade directories. Linking with trade directories or business clubs not only gets you more advertising, clients clicking through from those sites will help to improve your ranking.
> Set up a separate blog. Setting up a blog outside your site and linking to it can also help the ranking. However, you need to balance this with the need to keep your site content slowly changing so you may want to mix news on your site with longer blogs on another site.
> Post articles on specialist article sites such as Ezine or Buzzle. These give you back links to your site and if your article is taken up by others they should acknowledge your authorship and provide links back to your site. For example, if a building company posts an article about loft conversion it can be picked up by DIY, plumber, electrics companies all over the world which gives great back links.


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