How to improve my website’s search rank - Webfactory

With more and more business moving onto the web, search engine optimisation or SEO is become increasingly important. A fantastic site is worth nothing if no one ever sees it. SEO is the art of making your site friendly to search engines like Google and Yahoo to achieve the best ranking for the keywords that your business is targeting.

So, what’s the golden rule to achieving that number one page rank? Well no one really knows exactly how the search engines rank pages apart from the search engines themselves. What we do know though, through observation, is what things seem to make a difference and what things did make a difference but nowadays seem not to.

What counts?
The main elements that seems to make the biggest difference are your site’s content, the number of links to your site and the quality of those links, i.e. do they come from sites which are relevant and rank high themselves, and the readability/structure of your site's code by the search engines.

Site Content
The content of your site is important because search engines scan it to see which words come up most often. If your target keywords are ‘houses in Cardiff’ and those words are nowhere on your site…guess what… your site isn't going to rank too well for those words. Try to include your keywords throughout your site. Closer to the top is considered more important that at the bottom of a page and using them in headings or in bold help search engines identify them as important. The density of the keywords relative to all content on your site is important too. Over do it and Google will punish you, too few and you will make little or no impact.

Links
Links have become very important in SEO. If you think about it, it makes a lot of senses to count the number of links to your site and analysing where those links come from to discover how high up the rankings a site should come. If a lot of people from high ranking sites link to your site then it probably means that your site is worth looking at, or from the other point of view, if no one links to you then it looks like no one thinks your site is worth looking at. So the lesson is… get links to your site, lots and make sure they come from quality, relevant sources. If you’re a house rental company for example you want links from other house rental companies or trade magazines not butchers and ice cream stores.

Structure
Structure is also important in SEO. I would recommend close attention is paid to good structure in your HTML. Nowadays you really should be using CSS for the design of your site resulting in much cleaner HTML which Google can read more easily. WebFactore.co.uk considers these things very important and all sites created are made in this way. Well structured HTML helps search engines to know not what's important in a web page. Text in a heading tag is likely to represent the theme of the content below it. A H1 tag is more important than a H2 and so on.

CSS drastically reduces the clutter in the HTML. Design and content are separated so the search engines don’t have to try to work their way through complicated code.

Other Ideas
There are other ways to get visitors to your site; two ways are paid advertising such as Google’s AdWords programme and offline advertising.

Google’s AdWords programme allows you to advertise your website on the right hand sponsored links section on Google’s results pages. Each time someone clicks through to your website you pay an amount based on a value you have set previously.

Listings are ordered by how much you are prepared to spend for the click so setting a low click price will save you money in one respect, but you may be so low down the list that no one ever clicks though.

Offline advertising is sometimes forgotten but can be a very effective means to drive traffic to your site. Think about your vehicles, letter heads, premises, newsletters, uniforms etc. Put your website everywhere and people will come.

As I have said previously, there is no golden formula to achieve that number one rank but these elements mentioned seem important. The web is full of SEO advice, I would recommend reading a few articles and certain themes will emerge. Alternatively one of our experts here at WebFactore can put together a package whereby we take care of all the SEO for your website and let you concentrate on your core business.