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What is SEO and how does it affect my business?

Written on 21 February 2012, published in Freelancing with an astounding 2 comments

SEO is big business, very big business. We’re all fighting to get to the top of Google, Yahoo or Bing, but there are a few things we can do to automatically give us an edge over our competitors. So, what is SEO and how does it affect my business?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. In layman’s terms, it’s how visible your site is to a search engine, but more that this, it’s how visible your site is though organic, natural methods. No adsense and no advertising.

Todays businesses have to compete with thousands of online competitors, and it’s impossible for all of us to appear on the first page of Google, (its the only one we care about right)? If you type “Web Designer” into Google, you’ll receive 67,700,000 results. Who in their right mind is going to sort through that lot? The majority of potential clients won’t go past the first page, at a push the second. So what can we do to bump ourselves up the list?

Code

Make sure you have a professionally designed site. Clean, semantic code is a great starting point. The easier it is for Google to read through your site, the easier it will be to “see” you. Google will actually mark websites down for having poorly written code. The quicker a site loads, the more Google likes you. Gone are the days of flashy, graphic’s heavy websites. We are pushing increasingly towards, minimal code and minimal graphics. Pure CSS loads a lot faster than most images will, and it will weigh a lot less too.

Images

All images should be compressed to reduce file size to a minimum. Don’t download your images off your camera and just upload them to your site, you will be doing yourself and your end user a disservice. Nobody likes to wait for images to load, especially on slower connections. There are some great image compression services out there, that can shave off valuable kilobytes. Take a look at http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/

Another valuable way to bring traffic to your site is by way of image search. This will only work if you name your images appropriately though. It’s very rare for someone to search for an image named, “image_23456.jpg.” On the other hand someone may find your site if the same image had been named, “iphone_icon_small.jpg.” Also don’t forget the ALT value. The ALT value is a description of an image for those that may be visually impaired and are using screen readers. Another scenario is the dreaded missing image, if your ALT value is filled out, you should at least have a description of the missing image. (for those that hang around).

Appropriate Tags

Just as in printed media, headlines are always given more importance. The eye is naturally drawn to them, as so are search engines. Search engines see that something is more important when a certain tag is applied to it. For headlines we apply H tags. H1 being the most important, right down to H6.

It should be mentioned that the words you use in these headline titles are incredibly important. Keywords are your currency. Take the title of this post for example: “SEO, what is it and how does it affect my business?” If someone searches in Google for “What is SEO?” then the chances of having this post appear are far higher than if the same text were used elsewhere in the post. My keywords are placed right in my H1 title.  As things move on in the world of SEO, best practices come and go, but your H tags are always a solid building block.

Keywords

There are some great tools out there for optimising keywords. If you use WordPress I can highly recommend the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast. It will take your post and analyze your keywords. It will tell you if your keywords are found in the post title, url, meta description and a whole array of other places you may not have thought to include them.

If you need to work out what keywords you want to target on your website, then you can’t go far wrong with the Google Keyword Tool. It will tell you just how popular your desired keywords are, and even let you know if there’s a market for those keywords.

Content

The first rule of blog/web content is to write content that people want to read. If people want to read it, then Google will want to read it. Write for humans, not for Google’s little robots. As the saying goes, “Build it, and they will come.” Never more true than with a blog. It may take time but your content will be seen.

The longer you can keep people on your website, the more pages they visit, and the lower your bounce rate is, then the more interest Google will take in your site. It will be seen as a site worth visiting. This is important!

Make your content relevant to your site. If you own a hardware store and you are writing about deep sea fishing, then you won’t really be doing yourself any favours. You should pick keywords relevant to your product or market, and focus on them throughout your entire website. I doubt that many DIY enthusiasts will be searching for tips on bass fishing, at least not in relation to any DIY project. Keep your content focused, and on topic. Your readers, and your blog will thank you for it.

Grammar

Spell check is your best friend. Why? Because Google says so… They will mark you down for poor spelling and grammar. The new Google algorithm Panda, is the most “human” yet. It wants to read content written for humans. Just as our opinion of an author can change after reading poorly written content, so can that of Google’s. Be careful.

While to many, SEO is still seen as a dark art, there are certainly things we can do to improve our website’s visibility. The base of any website must be solid. This is why it’s essential to have a professionally designed and coded site. Your content must be of the highest quality possible, and you should write with the reader in mind. Following just these few basic requirements, you will push yourself up those search pages, and will hopefully increase your traffic and in turn increase your business.

If you have any handy little hints that you would like to share, then please feel free to leave a comment below.

Good luck!