How Will SEO Improve My Website?
First of all, to be clear, we optimize websites to rank well in Google search result pages (SERPs): that will usually work well for other search engines such as Yahoo! and Bing, but as Google is the 800lb gorilla, that’s the one we want to aim for.
Google’s objective is to to provide searchers with good quality, relevant content when they conduct a keyword search, and they do that by ranking websites according to over 200 different factors, using proprietary algorithms that are closely guarded secrets. We do know some of the main factors that influence rankings; including the quality of the content (partly judged by the length of time visitors spend on the site), the relevance to the search term (how often it appears, and where), what other quality websites link to the target site and, increasingly, whether it has a high profile on social media.
To gain the maximum benefit, search engine optimization traditionally focuses on three key areas:
Technical factors
When a website is initially designed and developed it is usually only minimally optimized for SEO in its structure and code. This is particularly true if it was created by a web design agency or developed by the business owner using a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress or Magento, with SEO plugins. The first phase of our work is to review the performance of your site and its code: loading speed, blocking factors, internal link structure, proper use of meta tags, semantic markup, responsiveness to tablets and mobile devices, etc. The objective of this phase is to facilitate indexing and improve the ability of Google’s robots and algorithms to understand and navigate through your website.
Optimizing content
The content of a website is rarely thought through from the point of organic search. Often it just starts as the minimum amount to get the website live, and then grows periodically, as new pages are added. This can lead to duplication of content, a disorganized structure and a lack of focus. Even worse, if someone has attempted to optimize the site for search engines, it could be over-optimized or be suffering from poor quality backlinks that could get it penalized or even banned.
To ensure that the site is professionally optimized, we will review the content for keyword targeting on dedicated pages, as well as latent semantic indexing (LSI), check the URL structures for keyword placement, construct internal links for the management of secondary pages, and optimize semantic markup and the text structure. If necessary, we will rewrite the content, including all the most important meta tags, to make sure that your website is both attractive to Google and provides valuable information for users, to boost the popularity of your site.
External factors
The third element in increasing visibility is creating links from other websites to enhance your site’s reputation in the eyes of Google’s bot. These links are known as backlinks, as they lead back to your site and when they are created it is important to utilize sites that are relevant to your business and have a good reputation. The sites can be major authority websites such as Huffington Post or Wikipedia, or might be social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. It is also useful to set up your own Web 2.0 sites like Weebly and Tumblr and link those back to your main site. We recommend building out your social media sites first and suggest that you have at least 150 to 200 backlinks from them. Once they are established, we use our proprietary systems and process to set up a network of high-quality links to both your main site and the properties to which you have linked.
The combination of these three factors will ensure that your site is recognized by Google and will result in improved rankings in the search engine results pages. The increased visibility will drive extra traffic to your site and the optimized pages will help to convert that traffic into profitable customers.