As the world quickly becomes more and more internet based it is important that a modern business keep up with the times. Gone are the days of looking through a phone book or asking friends about a company that may be able to help you with a problem. These days everything needs to be quick and efficient, if you have a problem just Google it.

This has offered a whole new range of possibilities when it comes to getting your company noticed, if you’re on the first page of Google results thousands upon thousands of potential customers will see your website every day. However this does come with a downside, this reliance on speed and efficiency means that if your website isn’t on the 1st few pages it won’t be getting much traffic or views.

That’s where Search Engine Optimization comes in, Search Engine Optimisation as its known is a used to boost your website all the way to the front page. We’ll only be covering the accepted techniques here, no shady dealings in this blog thank you very much.  Having said that here are the basics that you’ll need to know:

 On-Page Optimization

First what you have to consider for Search Engine Optimisation is the on-page content for your online blog or ecommerce website. Examples of on-page optimization include actual meta tags, keyword placement and keyword density. Now I know this might sound a bit technical all of a sudden, so I’ll slow down and explain what those are.

Meta tags are small pieces of text that describe a page’s content. They don’t appear on the page itself but in the HTML code.  The three tags we’ll be looking at are the Title Tag, Meta Description and the Meta Robots Attribute. The Title Tag is simply the title that your page will have in the Google search results, so you will want to make sure it is short and to the point. The Meta Description is the text underneath the title in the Google search result, so once again you’ll want it to be short and to the point but also descriptive with Keywords (we’ll get to keywords later). Finally the Meta Robot Attribute, now this may sound very Sci-fi but sadly it’s not, Search engines send out software called spiders to index pages on the internet to determine where they appear on search rankings and this is simply a code that tells the search engines what to do with your pages. For example: show the page in search results, follow any links on your page or not etc.

Now Keyword placement and density is a little more down to earth, with this you simply need to place your websites keywords correctly around your website. You see search engines viewing your website as discussed above look in quite specific places for keywords, and just spamming them all over the page is frowned upon. You’ll want to make sure the keywords are located in the title of the page, within the first 25 words of the first paragraph, within the last 25 words of the page and possibly bold them. This will draw the search engine’s attention while making sure your page’s content is varied and the same word doesn’t keep appearing over and over again.

Interlinking

The next thing to take note of is just how easy it is for search engine spiders to navigate your website, the fewer clicks the better in this case. You want to make sure that your main page can link to any given page, this will make your site and any information on it easily accessed for both consumers and search engines. The best way to do this is with internal links and supplementary URL structures. For example, you can internally link a text “ecommerce” to a page within your website content located at https://www.weareyellowpixel.com/ecommerce/.

Of course what also needs to be taken into account is that search engines won’t be able to enter pages that require forms to be filled out, only accessible through internal search bars and links restricted by the code itself.

These two things are key to Search Engine Optimisation and getting your website higher on Google page rankings, however there is still more to cover so stay tuned for more Search Engine Optimisation posts in the future.