We live in an age where the acronymic library is ever-increasing. The internet has become a breeding ground for many TLA’s (Three Letter Acronym’s – excuse the irony), but one of the more interesting and useful ones to business owners is SEO – Search Engine Optimisation.
It was only a few months ago that I understood the importance of SEO in enhancing your online presence. Before then, I never took into consideration how certain websites would have prominence in search engine ranking. In order to better position yourself to market to the public, you have to market yourself to the search engines first; they want unique, rich content to populate their pages and, the more content you have to offer, the higher your chances of reaching the esteemed first page of the search results.
Search Engines such as Google don’t have the resources to manually analyse the 850,000,000 registered websites that currently exist on the internet, so instead they use ‘robots’ which automatically scan website content using an algorithm which will determine a website’s ranking. Some of the factors which will improve your ranking include:
Keeping your page active – If you don’t regularly update your website, your content could be considered outdated in comparison to other websites offering similar information.
Write plenty – Your website will stand out much more if it contains as much understandable, unique, relevant, and informative text as possible.
Use of images – It’s beneficial to bulk up your pages with plenty of useful textual content, but the use of images will give your visitors something to look at too. Make sure to include relevant meta tags with your images so that Google’s robots pick these up when analysing your website.
Use of keywords – If you want your website to achieve a higher ranking when people type in a particular search term into a search engine, you have to make sure you are using those keywords consistently – without overusing them – on your website.
Unique content – Don’t copy passages from other websites verbatim otherwise there is nothing to differentiate your page from the source, and you will be penalised as a result – that’s unless you backlink to the source of the information you have copied. In which case, that can work in your favour.
There is a lot more to SEO than the points I’ve made above, and the specifications of what the search engines consider a high-ranking website is constantly changing.
If you’d like us to help drive your website up the rankings, get in contact with us to find out more.