SEO Cardiff
Space on White Services
SEO Cardiff - Search Engine Optimisation
At Space on White we are passionate about creating websites that look good, are easy to navigate and function well, unfortunately this is only half the job when providing a website solution that is going to work.
What good is a website that has all the bells and whistles if nobody ever gets to find out it exists? Disclaimer: We don't actually attach bells and whistles to your website...unless of course you are a company that sells bells or whistles!
So over the years in addition to keeping ourselves up to date with the latest languages and styling techniques, we have also had to get up to speed and as it happens excel in what is known widely as SEO, Search Engine Optimisation.
What is Search Engine Optimisation?
In short, as mentioned above it's about getting your website found in search results for engines such as Google and Yahoo to name a few. If you're a plumber based in Cardiff, then if someone does a Google search for "plumber Cardiff", you want to be coming back towards the top of the search results.
There are many ways in which this is achieved as well as a number of influencing factors.
Below is an overview of the things that can affect your websites performance in search engines.
Keyword Rich Content
By keywords we mean, funnily enough words that are key to your industry, service or that relate generally to the what's and whys of your industry. For example a car garage's keywords would be things like MOT, exhaust, tyres or service due.
When beginning to think about content it is important to not look at the solution you are offering, but instead what is the problem that your potential customers will be searching for. For instance someone with a bad back may not realise they need to see a chiropractor, they will more likely do a search for "bad back treament Bridgend". You would therefore need to ensure that the text content and titles etc within the website were all tailored around these types of keywords and phrases.
Incoming Links
Something that is important to SEO is incoming links and this is something you can do without any web development skills and will turn out to be an on-going project for you if you chose to take it on.
An incoming link is a link on another website that points to your website. We all use links every day, if we do a Google search, we click a link that takes us to another website and so on. Often on one website we click a link which takes us off to another site, this is what we need to achieve. We need to get as many sites as possible pointing at our website so that when users click the link they are brought to our site.
The benefits of this are two-fold. Firstly if we have our site link on lots of other site, there is a good chance people will click the link, visit our site and perhaps end up buying something or contacting you about your service.
The second is that Google robots, which are the robots Google sends out to crawl websites will think, hey this website has lots of people who are linking to it, this must mean the content is relevant and meaningful so we best give it a good level of importance, otherwise known as the Google ranking. The higher the Google ranking of the website that is pointing at you the better, as if an important website is pointing at you, you must be at least as important....and so on.
Be patient
The painful thing about SEO is that it can take time. There are no quick fixes so once a site goes live, or when changing an existing site, allow time for the changes to be picked up by Google and to take effect.
There is always something else you could be getting on with in the SEO world. Even if it is just to comment on other peoples relevant blogs to get an incoming link or two more!
Good HTML coding practices
HTML is the code that developers write to create websites. It is important that the code is written in such a way as to conform to standards and the "good way" of doing things. Search engines can penalise bad code but not only this if written badly you can miss out on some of those "puzzle pieces" that we need to put together to ensure a good end result.
There is a revolution occurring at the moment in the introduction of a newer version of HTML, HTML5. IN addition to HTML, developers also use something called CSS. This is the code that is used to style the website, so setting the size of fonts or the background colour of the page and so on, anything visual is usually, or should be at least, controlled by CSS. There is also a new version of CSS right now, CSS3.
There are many new things being introduced but one of the benefits of these new languages is that they have better support for using different fonts. Up until now if a developer wanted to make a header look snazzy with a nice looking font they would have had to have had the header as an image as there only a few select fonts installed on every computer so there was limited choice. With these new languages developers can now download specific fonts to your computer which allow us to have a header as text that can contain those all import key words. This means that if we have an important header to the page, such as Back relief Cardiff, Google will know about this text being on the page which then says to our friend Mr Google that this page has the answer to the users problem.
The above is a very high level insight but gives you an example of the types of things needed to be taken into consideration with website coding to help with SEO.
Attract visitors with Social Media
It sounds a bit backwards but to get more people to come to your site, you have to get people to come to your site. No I haven't banged my head!
We would all love to have Google bring hordes of visitors to our site every month but in order to do this we now know we need to make our site as important as possible, or in other words get our Google ranking up. Another thing Google takes into account is the number of people who visit the site every month. If you have lots of visitors, the site must be good, correct?
One way of doing this is using social media. Get people following you on Twitter and Facebook. That way you can offer deals or competitions etc to entice them back to the site, once they are back they have counted towards your visitors for the month, to quote a rather crazy meerkat, simples!
FAQ
Will my website get to Number 1 in Google?
Ah yes the Holy Grail. Unfortunately it is impossible to guarantee a number 1 slot in Google and if anyone says they can they are lying, end of story. There are so many things that influence a position in search engine results, here are just a few.
- The competition in your market. If you are selling do-it-yourself hardware supplies and you want to try and hit the UK market the likely hood is that your B & Q's and Focus DIY websites etc are very much likely to dominate the top positions so a more realistic term to aim for may be Hardware supplies Cardiff, obviously if you were based in Cardiff!
- The number of incoming links you have from reputable, relevant websites. The idea is that if you have a large number of other websites pointing at your website with links, the likely hood is that your website has something good to offer as all these other websites are offering you to their visitors, presumably because the content is good or is offering a good service etc.
- The quality of the code that has been used to develop your website. As we all know there are many ways to skin a cat, thankfully not a common thing these days but in the same way there are many ways to "write a website". As with everything it can be done the good way or the bad way. Done badly a website can have no chance of competing in its market but written correctly and with a number of small pieces of a puzzle put together correctly, a website can indeed hold its own.
That said we are very good at puzzles, SEO ones in particular and proven success in getting sites to number 1 in Google or at least to a respectable position on the first page.
How long will it take for my new website to start working in Google?
Again this can vary. We have had sites start appearing in search results within a few days, other times it can take weeks.
Like a good wine as long as you look after your site it will get better with age. The longer the domain has been about, assuming good SEO has been undertaken on the site, the better it will perform as it builds a reputation and Google knows the site is legitimate and worth visiting.