SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it began as a way to index the emerging content being published on the internet. Nowadays, this revolves very heavily around Google, which started life as a website called Back Rub and the domain Google was registered in 1997.
SEO is basically the practice of improving a website’s ranking and visibility on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
In the early days, we saw keyword stuffing, placing “invisible” text on a page and meta tags as often misused strategies to get your website to rank on the first page of a search engine.
Google were quick to crack down and penalise these strategies and now has more than 200 ranking factors, such as text quality and length. These factors determine where your website appears in its search results for a phrase. Google’s bots crawl the web all the time, indexing websites. As soon as it has been crawled, your website joins Google’s search index of hundreds of billions of web pages. So it goes without saying that the more niche or unique you can be with your keyphrases, the more likely you are to be found.
For your SEO, I include a basic service as part of the build. The website code is SEO friendly, images are named for optimisation and there are meta tags. I’ll also advise on a SEO friendly, navigational structure (how we link your pages to the menu). The other big SEO factor is content – the more keyword rich text the better. This is why you see so many sites with blogs!
It can also depend on the market you are in and how local your services are. If you let me know, I can advise on a strategy. The only thing I don’t offer is a guarantee. If you are looking for guaranteed results, the budget needs to be “healthy” and regular and I work with a colleague, Michelle from And Marketing, who is a Google certified, award-winning marketing and promotions expert. She can advise on keyword planning and promotional channels for your website before you get started on a build.
