SEO

The big one that everyone wants to know everything about - SEO. There is far too much to SEO to get into all the details here, but this article is designed to give you an overview as to how search engines work.

As briefly discussed in our page about launching your website, search engines are independent companies who's job is to help people find what they're looking for. Sort of like Directory Enquiries – except the customer isn't charged. Search engine companies have little "robots" (which are little scripts of code, not actual metal shaped people with tin heads!) which trawl the Internet collecting as much information as they can find about the websites they visit. They can also be known as spiders, because they spider the web - basically finding a website, and visting every link to another page they can find, and jumping from site to site in this way. This is why it's important to interlink the pages of your site and to give these spiders plenty to trawl when they visit your site.

They then use the information they gain from your site to decide where to rank you when someone carries out a search for something to do with your business.

One thing you should understand is that SEO isn't just something you "set up"; you can't just tick the box and move on. I've had emails in the past asking "oh, and can we please come up for xxx too, thanks!". But I'm afraid it doesn't work like that, because of course lots of other people want to come up for that term too, and so it takes lots of work to convince Google and the other search engines that yours should be shown above your competitors.

There are 2 main types of SEO:

On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to things on your website which can be done to help it be indexed (kept on file and listed in results) by search engines. This involves the words you use on your pages, the titles you give your pages, the bits you tell search engines are the "headings", and linking pages of your website together thoroughly. It also is things like neat "search engine friendly" URLs (http://www.yourwebsite.com/about-your-company rather than http://www.yourwebsite.com/index.php?=123) and keeping the front-end code of your website neat and tidy (that's one for your developer!).

Lots of people have heard of "meta tags" and the "keyword meta tag" but it's no longer a case of just stuffing your keywords in one hidden place on the page and letting search engines do the rest. Search engines got wise a decade or so ago to people putting keywords in that tag that didn't correspond to what their site was about, so now you need to have your keywords as themes that run throughout your content.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to things you do away from your website, around the web, such as link building (getting other people to link to you), using social media, and just generally promoting your website around the web.

Link building is a huge factor of your site's success – but it should be an organic, natural process which in reality, everyone gives a helping hand to! The Internet is about sharing information and those little spiders use links between sites to get from site to site. Sites linking to you is also a sign that they like you – it's sort of a vote in your favour. So the more "votes" you get, the better your reputation with search engines. And votes from important sites, like newspapers or the BBC, are even better votes than those from other small businesses – and votes from nasty, spammy sites are really not good votes and can do you more harm than good. The sites that link to you should be relevant to your business, and ideally (for you!) rank well for the terms you want to come up for.