What is SEO

All eSum Web Solutions websites are designed to be search engine friendly.  Get the basics right and you're well on the way to achieving a high search engine rank. Here we cover those basic issues for you. They’re pretty straightforward to do but if you'd rather get on with running your business and let someone else implement these on YOUR site please contact us.

Key words

Spend a bit of time working out what your ideal customer might type into a search engine when looking for you. Try to think like them, for instance they might not know the technical term for something you sell so what might they type instead?

Ask friends/relatives who have a rough idea what you do what they would type into a search engine to find your website. Some of the results might surprise you but it’s when those key words are used that you need to encourage the search engines to rank you higher than your competitors.

It’s worth spending some time on this aspect right at the start to ensure that everything you do on your site from then on makes a difference.

Content

Provide visitors with the information they are looking for.

High quality content, especially on the “Home” page, is essential. Pages which contain useful information will “engage” your visitor and they will return to you again and again and will eventually become customers.

In addition, quality content will encourage other web sites to link to your site and this will raise your profile on search engines. Write clear, concise pages about your topic and be sure to include the words that a user you wish to attract would type into a search engine.

Site navigation

Use a logical link structure.

Test your site out on a friend to see if they can find something ideally in two clicks or less once they have arrived on your “Home” page. And ensure that all pages have at least one direct link on a menu or sub menu otherwise they may be overlooked by the search engines. It’s not that they can’t find them, it’s more that they cannot be certain that you aren’t trying to hide something within the site so they just ignore the links.

Try opening your site using a text browser e.g. Lynx. Search engine robots see your site in much the same way that a text browser would so you can see what words they are seeing. Beware of features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash. You’ll see that in a text browser this sort of content is almost invisible and therefore won’t help your search engine optimisation efforts.

External Links

Quality inbound links are invaluable.

Think about it this way, who’s the most important person at a party? It’s often the person who knows the most people at the party. The same applies to your website, the more inbound links the search engines stumble across the more important they will believe your site to be.

You have plenty of suppliers and the more you sell the more they sell so get them to provide a link from their site to yours. The same applies to your happy customers, ask them to provide a link from their website to yours as a valuable supplier and over time your SEO ranking will benefit.

Some things to avoid

BEWARE – There are very many offers of “Search Engine Optimisation” available. Find out exactly HOW they plan to implement a strategy. It’s easy to get hundreds or thousands of inbound links to your sites by using “link farms”, totally unrelated sites that just include links to websites. If Google or any other search engine spots this your site could be ignored completely and won’t be returned in ANY searches. For more information see Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.

Don't hide keywords on your pages.

Search engines can easily see that you have included, for instance, white words on a white background. These are invisible to users but search engines will see the words. However, if the search engine spots that the text is invisible to users it will at best ignore the text and at worst ignore the whole site!

Don’t feel obliged to buy expensive SEO services right from the start.

Get your site built and live and get the basic SEO in place (i.e. key words naturally included in the site content plus basic meta data). Let the search engines trawl and rank the site for a couple of months and then see how well you are doing. Tweak the content if your key words, the words users would be searching on, are not performing well. Once you’ve got the basics right ONLY THEN is it worth looking into more advance SEO.

Don’t overuse images.

Search engines cannot read the words in images on your site so make sure that ALL images include relevant “Alt” tags (An “Alt” tag is simply an HTML label for an image). Definitely don’t create a pdf or scan a word document and simply upload that as an image for your home, it will appear completely blank to a search engine.

Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs.

Some sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages containing the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. Ensure that your preferred page is included in search results blocking duplicates from spiders using a robots.txt file. For information about using a robots.txt file. For more information see managing Googlebot.