Search Engine Optimisation That Works

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29th October 2011

Search Engine Optimisation That Works

We're lucky enough to have a large number of clients offering a broad spectrum of products and  services through their businesses; from charities, to social care, through tourism and engineering, to the financial sector and art and design.

This has allowed us to explore the full gamut of search engine optimisation over the years that we've been working with them.

How To Get Top Listings On Google

Getting to the top of Google

Well, regardless of what some marketing companies will try and tell you, there's no simple way to achieve this. This is a goal that takes time and effort. Lots of effort.

The work starts with a properly understood approach to business marketing. We need to know what you're selling, making, offering in order to make the web work to your advantage. This is the really BIG picture that you have for your business.

We can't make your site contribute to these goals if we don't understand what they are.

Then there's a bunch of technical aspects to good SEO.

SEO best practice means we have to create a website that -

  • is well laid out.
  • runs quickly.
  • is clearly structured and easy to navigate.

We also need to make sure that all possible relevant information about the business is presented clearly and properly on the site.

This gives us a good platform to build on. In fact, if we get this right we are probably 60% there already in terms of optimising your site's performance.

The next 40% is much more subtle and is where the real high performance SEO kicks in.

SEO Basics

Google's stated aim is to give high positions to genuine and useful websites and to penalise those that are either pretending to be something they're not, or that have less to them than meets the eye. (These can be sites with just a few pretty pictures on them, and nothing else; or sites that are too "flashy" and animated at the expense of any really useful text information for visitors.) The sites are scored and ranked according to these criteria.

The first 60% of this score is already covered in good content and layout of the site.

The next 40% is then gained from a combination of other external factors. These can include some or all of the following:

  • age of the site - how long have you been on the web; older is better (less likely to be flaky or fly-by-night)
  • internal and external references - links to your site from other reputable sites, and links from your sites to other reputable sites
  • up-to-date-ness / freshness - fresh content added daily is highly prized by Google. It shows you're alive and well!
  • richness of content - building depth and breadth of content in small bite-sized pages adds to your story over time
  • integration with social media - recommendations on Facebook, Tweets on Twitter, +1 on Google and many other social recommendation systems are also used as indicators of your site's quality by Google.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, of a long list of possible options that can be explored; others include Pay Per Click campaigns (like Google Adwords), email marketing (like MailChimp) or professional online networking like LinkedIn.

We tailor make our recommendations to the businesses that we're promoting. One size doesn't fit all.

How to Win on Google

The game is a long one and you have to be prepared to play every round. The competition is perpetual and we are keen to help all our clients to plan a manageable and practical strategy to keep their sites performing well.

This includes recommending stories and themes for regular blog posts, pay-per-click campaigns, annual updates and revisions to main page content, plus a whole lot of appropriate extras that may benefit that specific business.

But Does it Work?

Yes.

We've got lots of examples of our sites being on page one or position 1-5 on Google for really solid search terms.

Try these for size:

The list goes on...

If you'd like to know more, or would like us to help with your site's development growth then please give us a ring on 01300 320076 or email jon@alacrify.co.uk

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