Six Top Tips To Get Your Website Found

Just having a website isn't enough to generate you sales enquiries. There are many search engine optimisation factors at work that make a difference between a business-generating website and a failing one.

 The most important thing is to get your website ranking highly on Google and the other search engines. There are six very effective things you can do to make sure your website does exactly that;

Keyword research

The first thing you absolutely must do is pick the right keywords to describe your business and focus your SEO. While you have your own ideas about the keywords you want to be found for, you need to think like a potential customer. What would they type in to find a company such as yourself? What keywords are frequently searched for in Google? You also need to avoid picking the same keywords as your competitors.

A good start would be to ask friends and employees what keywords they would use to describe your services. It's also worth taking a look at competitors websites too. Google also provides a very effective free tool too. Called Google Trends, this system allows you to type in any keyword and see how popular it is. It will also show you which countries are using it and what are the most popular related keywords. If you spend some time looking in to what keywords are most relevant to your business, you'll be putting your website in a fantastic position for potential sales enquiries.

Website design

It's an obvious thing to say but good website design is absolutely essential.  It will ensure that the search engines can access your site, find all the pages and understand all the content. It will also make sure that navigation for the end user is quick, easy and simple. Clean and standards-obeying code and fast loading times will also make it easy for search engine spiders to index your website.

A mobile friendly and 'responsive' website

With more and more people searching on their phones and tablets, it's imperative that your website is viewable on a range of devices. This is what is known as a 'responsive website'. This will make it easier for your potential customers to read through the site and view whatever they need to see. It will also give Google yet another reason to rank your site highly. (Google's recent algorithms now promote responsive websites over non mobile-friendly ones).

Original content

One of the biggest mistakes any website can make is having incredibly repetitive content. Until recently, websites with large numbers of pages using the same keywords tended to do quite well in search engine rankings. This led to scrupulous website design and search engine optimisation companies using software to automate thousands of incredibly similar pages. Thankfully, Google put a stop to them adding thousands of repetitive pages with one of its recent algorithms. It is therefore worth making sure that every page on your site is written differently. It will also show Google that there is plenty of original and worthwhile content throughout the site.

Keyword density

While it is important that your chosen keywords show up lots of times on your website, you also have to be careful that they're not repeated too much. This is known as keyword stuffing; do this and your pages will be dropped. You'll need to make sure that the keywords are nicely spread across each page and keeping the density at a reasonable rate. There is nothing worse than having just a couple of paragraphs full of keywords on a ten page website. This will just tell Google that you have a couple of relevant paragraphs and nothing more.

External links

Also called backlinks or third party links, search engines will consider how many other websites are linking to yours as a sign of its quality. This was another area open to abuse as people found ways to automate link building into poor quality directories. Another Google update called Penguin changed the way this is calculated. Links now have to come from websites that are relevant to the keywords. They also have to meet Google’s opinion of a good quality website.

The search engine optimisation experts

More than ever, quality is the name of the game with Google closing numerous quick-fix routes to good search engine positioning. While you can carry out search engine optimisation yourself, it's highly recommended that you leave this to professionals. Call the Smart Domain Group today on 01634 810600 to discuss your search engine optimisation needs with one of our friendly and helpful team.