This is without a doubt the MOST important aspect of your website. Without good practice search engine optimization your site won’t appear in google search and potential clients and sales will be lost your competitors.
It’s important to note, Google pays no attention to your actual images or your site colours and design, in fact all google sees is ‘text’ they are a text reader. View your site as text only and you will see what Google sees – that is why good copy is so important and your images are labelled and given text descriptions otherwise they will mean nothing to google in context to your site.
No two people will get the same results when searching for a keyword phrase. So if you are in Perth searching for ‘wedding rings’ and your partner is in Sydney searching for the same phrase – you will get completely different results. You will even get different results if you are sitting next to each other on different devices depending on your previous search history. So just because your website appears on the top of the list when you search for it on your office computer – it does not mean that is where it appears for everyone else.
Google uses 200 different algorithms to determine who appears in the google search pages for a given keyword.
To give you an example here is some of the criteria that google will use to determine if your website appears before or after your competitors and how high up it will rank you :-
- Age of the website (how long it’s been live on the web)
- Online reputation of the hosting provider hosting the website
- Where the person that is searching is located in the world
- What their previous search history is of the person doing the search
- Site engagement – how long people spend on your site and the number of pages they visit compared to your competitors
- Bounce rate – if people leave your site quickly without clicking on anything
- How many other sites that link to your site and the reputation of those sites – sites with a bad reputation will adversely affect your result
- The flow of your copy and the relevance to your keywords
- Links within your site, so your page links to other page links throughout your website
- Good practice keyword placement i.e. in Page Titles, Headers and scattered throughout the text
Avoid reciprocal links – i.e. getting friends of yours with a site to link to you and you linking to them. Google knows is just a link exchange and gives it no value
Avoid keyword cramming – the old practice of listing off a swag of keywords at the top of a home page (hidden in code)
Don’t put your important text in an image, be sure your copy is text.
Dedicate one page to each of your top keyword phrases. Don’t try and cover all your keywords on one page. Your keyword should appear on average in short and long phrases and in the title of the page and header approx. 10 times.
Be sure to list your business on google business (google plus) this will also help with your rankings.
Youtube and facebook are also great tools to help boost your online profile and web presence.
