This post is provided by David Gelb, Director James Blake Web Services UK.
If you’ve set up a website and need to start promoting it, so that you capture as many sales leads as possible, you’ll need to use search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to ensure your website is found at the top of search engines.
While on one level this can be a simple process involving keywords and meta-tags, it can be complicated if you have no experience in web design optimisation. If you’re a business owner looking to market your website and enhance its presence on the web, it’s recommended that you seek the services of a digital agency who can handle your requests.
There are three types of search engines and the biggest two, Google and Yahoo! work by creating giant indices of information stored in databases which can be searched. The search engine uses algorithms to determine the relevancy of the information in the index to what the user is searching for.
If for example you search for ‘London digital agency’ in Google, this will crawl through all the databases and return a plethora of relevant results based on the information which has been indexed.
How does SEO work?
SEO techniques rely on working with the algorithms to scan the frequency and location of key words on a web page. The more frequently a web page has a number of key words, the more relevant it will be and appear more highly search engine results. While this is one technique which websites have often used to become more visible, web technology has become more sophisticated at discouraging keyword stuffing or spamdexing.
Google’s Panda algorithm which came into effect in 2011 has ensured that only quality content ranks highly. To analyse this, the Panda algorithm has quantified the user engagement and experience quality by looking at the amount of time spent on the website, the bounce rate, number of web pages per visit, page response times and conversion rates. These metrics give a good clue at how effective a website is at keeping its visitors engaged.
More importantly, another important element which an algorithm analyses is how the pages link to one another. A search engine analyses how pages link to each other and what a page is about. It does this by checking if the keywords are similar to the keywords on the original page and whether that page is then more ‘important’. If it is, it will be ranked more highly.
A web developer will know all about these changes and how to work with the search engines so as to increase your website ranking properly, without resorting to artificial methods.
SEO is important if you want more people to see your website as most internet users have short attention spans, so expect to find a solution within the first two to three Google pages. A digital agency will be able to get your website ranked highly on the search engines which will maximise your sales leads.
