SEO Services UK – Search Engine

Optimisation for Business Websites

SEO Services UK – Lead Generating Websites provides SEO Services UK combined with lead generation strategies that not only increase your website’s Google rankings, but help you convert those extra visitors to prospects and customers.

What is SEO?

SEO is a process which aims to make a website more visible in Google and other search engines for relevant keywords.

The results are higher placement in search engines for certain keyword queries and so more visitors.

The crucial aspect is that these visitors are highly targeted and motivated.

In the UK Google owns such a huge marketshare – usually put at around 90% – that SEO is really GSO, or Google Search Optimisation

There are two distinct aspects to SEO – on-page and off-page,

 

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is concerned with the elements of a web-page (and a website) itself.

On-page SEO focuses on;

• urls
• page titles
• page headings
• body copy
• images
• content
• internal structure and linking
• page load speed

Keywords

Before any SEO work can take place keywords must be established.
Keywords are the search terms that your target customers are typing into Google – before you do anything business-related on the internet you must establish which keywords you are targeting.

Once you have a set of keyword SEO can begin – SEO is always about making a website more relevant for a set of keywords. These keywords are the words that your target customers are using to search for products and services like yours.

Urls, Page Titles, Headings & Copy

Google is essentially a huge machine, a robot. It is not human, it can assume or infer – it can only respond to signals and signs and the clearer the signals and signs the easier it is for Google to carry out its work.

Google is concerned with only one thing – the experience of the searcher. Its primary question then is; ‘How relevant is your website to what the searcher is looking for?”

If Google considers your website to be relevant then it will provide good rankings.

The first thing Google checks is whether keywords are present in the crucial places;

• urls
• page titles
• page headings
• body copy

A page targeting a keyword will have an advantage if that word is present in the URL, the page title and headings on the page.

For example an article like this discussing SEO Services which is targeting the term ‘SEO Services UK’ should have the URL;

http://wwww.YourDomain/seo-services-uk

The page title should contain the term and ideally be between 40  and 70 characters, eg.;

SEO Services UK: The Facts You Need To Know

The sub-headings on the page might be (I’ve used ones here that can be adapted to keywords about any service);

How to find SEO Services UK
Evaluating SEO Services UK
Issues with SEO Services UK
Negotiating SEO Services UK

And finally within the body of the article ‘SEO Services UK’ should appear with about 2-3% ratio – this means that for every 100 words the term ‘SEO Services UK’ should appear 2 or 3 times. Now, in all honesty, keyword density is not as important as it once was and it is better to have a well-written and naturally flowing piece rather than something which is stuffed full of keywords but doesn’t read so well for the human visitor.

Additionally images can be optimised using ALT tags. Google cannot ‘read’ images and so relies on these tags to describe the content of an image – using your keyword in these image tags further signposts to Google what your page is about. Vary your keywords slightly in your ALT tags, eg. SEO Services UK, effective SEO Services UK, UK SEO Services, SEO Services for the UK, etc.

In terms of length experts recommend between 300 – 500 words per post, or article. This is based on the minimum number of words that a search engine needs to be able to accurately categorise your content, however since Google’s Panda update things have changed somewhat and I, and others, have found that articles with 1000 – 1500 words will rank much better than shorter articles.  But of course, like everything, this is dependent on the competitiveness of the market you are operating in.

Summary

• select your target keyword phrase and use this as the page title
• write a relevant article title and 3 – 4 sub-headings all containing the keyword
• write relevant in-depth article of between 1000 – 1500 words
• use images and optimise ALT tags

Advanced tips

Content multiplication – Create a pdf of the article, upload it to your server and link to it at the end of the article.
Record yourself reading the article and add it as an mp3 file to the page – use ‘Audacity’ free recording software.
Use the recording to make a simple video with powerpoint, upload to Youtube and then embed on your page.

Google favours multi-media sites so if you can have text, images, mp3, video and pdf Google will reward you with higher rankings.

Also Google monitors how long users spend on a webpage – if Google sees that many visitors go to a particular page and then leave within 20 seconds it assumes that the page is not relevant for that search term and rankings will suffer. Having different media, especially video, keeps users on your page longer!

Internal linking – not something that  is often talked about but is in fact a very effective way to show Google which pages are your most important. Just as in the wider web, Google has an overview of linking patterns on individual websites – if the majority of links are pointing to a small number of pages this indicates that these pages are more important and Google will serve these in the results accordingly.

So if you have a blog on your website, or a number of thematically linked content pages you should be linking to a primary page for that subject.

For example; this website sells three primary products;

• websites
• targeted traffic
• Facebook marketing

The pages I really want to drive qualified traffic to are my sales pages, therefore to alert Google to this I link all my blog posts about SEO and keyword research to my Targeted Traffic sales page. Articles about Facebook all link to my Facebook sales page.

With a bunch of keyword rich links from thematically relevant articles I really am giving Google all the signposts it needs to rank my site well for my chosen keywords.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is all about linking – how many backlinks do you have pointing to your page?

Generally speaking the website that has the most links will be placed higher in the search engines

What is a backlink?

A link is an image or set of characters (words & sentences) that when clicked open up a new webpage. This new page could be on the same website or on a different website.

A backlink is a link on a third party website that takes the user to your website. Look at the image below and you’ll see three websites (A,B & C) pointing to a fourth website (your website), the arrows represent links and Google views these links as votes for a website.

Someone is saying “Take a look at this website because it has some useful, relevant information on it.”

You see, in the beginning all linking was natural – webmasters linked to the content of others because it was good content that their visitors would get value from.

A first it was assumed that the web would be randomly interconnected, that there would be no real order but a chaotic ‘spaghetti bowl’. However when it was analysed via a computer program it was found that there was order to linking, that some sites were ‘hubs’, or authority sites, which were sucking links to them like some kind of vitual black hole.

As a result of this finding it became apparent that this natural order of linking could inform search engine ranking algorithyms – the sites that had the most links pointing to them were evidently the sites holding the best content and therefore the most value and so Google rewarded those sites with high ranking.

These days Google is a lot more sophisticated, but backlinks remain the single biggest off-page ranking factor. Social media activity has become an influential factor recently but backlinks are still where it’s at with regards ranking websites in organic search results.

Backlinks Are Not Created Equal

There are two primary factors which determine how powerful a backlink is;

• where the link has come from
• the actual text used in the link

The higher the ‘trust rank’, or authority, of the site giving the link, the more powerful it is. A link from a well-estblished site is worth far more than a link from a brand new website.
As well as the authority of a site we must also consider the subject matter – sites that have similar subject matter to your site provide better backlinks than other sites.

The final variable is the actual text used in the link itself. A link that uses the words ‘click here’, or ‘read more’ is too general, it is MUCH better to use the keyword in the link than a generic phrase.

Summary

The site giving the link should be relevant and trustworthy, whilst the link itself should be a relevant keyword.

How do I get links?

Links can be gathered naturally by having great content and syndicating it on social media – other websites will be happy to link to you if you provide top-quality content that is useful and relevant to their readers.

Links can be also be manufactured and these days this is pretty much a necessity for any website wishing to beat their competitors to have a link building strategy.

You can create links on;

• online business directories
• article directories
• social media sites
• video sharing sites
• forum profiles
• forum signatures
• blog comments
• web 2.0 sites
• pdf sharing sites

Google looks for a varied ‘link profile’, meaning that if all your links come from article directories, or forums, then you will be penalised.

The key is to look natural – build links slowly and consistently.

Advanced tips

Link velocity – be aware of link velocity – the speed at which links are built. If you drop 100,000 links on a website in the first month and then stop, although Google may rank you well at the beginning you will soon drop down. This is extremely unnnatural and it is infintely better to spread those 100,000 links out over 6 – 12 months. Whether it be 100,000 or 100 links the principle remains the same – regularly and consistently.

Indexing – building the link is only half the battle – it must also be indexed by Google – if Google doesn’t know that the link exists then it cannot count towards your ranking.
Forum profiles are notoriously difficult to get indexed and even if you can they tend to disappear when the forum cleans house of inactive accounts.

To get the best return on the time you spend building links concentrate on article directories, web 2.0 sites and blog comments, with business directories, pdf sites and video sites as your secondary sources.