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SEO Explained…Without Getting Confused

Search Engine Optimisation may sound technical but it really isn’t!

…and it affects us all, directly.

SEO is something that we all should be aware of because it affects us all – no matter how little you tell yourself you spend online. SEO results in billionaires and bankruptcy. From Facebook to ordering a pizza, it is directly responsible for the growth of websites you have love. SEO is what google kindly ‘request’ website designers take the time to do. If you do as google wants you to; you become the next big thing, go against googles kind ‘request’, nobody ever hears of your life changing new invention.

I will call it seo from here on – optimisation takes too long to say. SEO, simply put, is web design that meets googles standards. SEO is just doing such things as making sure the websites photos are properly tagged, making sure that your descriptions meet a certain amount of words etc. All easy to do; but the the amount of rules is about the size of your average phone book. And it keeps changing.

SEO takes such a long time to learn and make sure all the boxes are ticked, people usually don’t do it. Many professional designers and ‘have-a-go hero’s’ just don’t have the time for proper SEO. Cheap web design usually has very little seo. It requires an uncapped number of hours to sustain and requires constant analytics and re-design. If you are thinking of getting cheap web design, know that proper SEO cannot be part of the deal…it just takes too long!

Is SEO For You?

SEO Quick Questions:

Correct SEO designs take time and money. Ask yourself the following

Do you need to be found online by people looking for your service?

Do you need to be found online by people looking for your products?

Is your website currently raking well?

Is google addwords the correct option for you?

Can SEO make you more money than you will pay?

If you already have more business than you can handle, you may not need Search Engine Optimisation services.

Getting Started With SEO

Keyword Research and SEO go together

If you know what people are looking for, you have a better chance of getting noticed

To give you an idea of what is involved, I would suggest that the first thing to do is get a sense for how many people are searching for particular words or phrases, then try to create a page that is built around that keyword. If you want to build a page focused on a particular word, there are a few points that should be done such as naming the page with that word, having a header starting with that word, having the paragraph under the header to give information about that word etc.

To research which words are the best, you need can create a google adwords account (its free)

SEO Main Points

The main points to know about your websites SEO are:

Google:'You should be cautious when choosing SEO' (work from designers.)

Google recommend that website owners be cautious when choosing SEO work from designers.

Bad SEO practices can result be being dropped from google. (e.g. BMW & Interflora)

Never try to use tactics that go against googles best practices. No matter how big you are, you have to ensure that your web designer or SEO specialist does not try to use bad practices to get you ahead of the competition. This article shows that BMW Germany had to work hard to get relisted after their “violation of our Webmaster quality guidelines”. Interflora was also suspected of doing something wrong when their ranking dramatically dropped from Google. You can read more about this here.

Your site content and structure needs to be correct. (What you say, how you say it and how you code it.)

What you say, how you say it and how you code it are the three major factors that will result in you having a well optimised website. The content is always the most important factor as you need to give well written, factual, well punctuated, up-to-date information. It makes sense that google will give priority to web designers that take the time to create good content. The content must be original as google will definitely fault you for copying other work. Well written work then needs to be coded correctly.Correct use of H1 tags and other tags and paragraphs are absolutely essential. If these tags and content are not correct, you are making life for google hard. Never make life for google hard!

Hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript need to be correct. (Size and Speeds Matter too)

Good hosting is vital. Try to ensure that the servers that your website is stored on are both google friendly and fast. Usually, you get what you pay for so don’t expect that budget hosting will be ticking all the boxes. Cheap hosting that is obtained from the other side of the world is not likely to be very useful as it will take longer for a user in Ireland to view your website as it will have to be sent from a server at the other side of the world. Google openly states that speeds are important and this factor will not help your website speeds.

Images must be the right size and described correctly (multiple images if necessary)

The images on your website need to be optimised to ensure that they don’t take forever to download from your server. If you take photos on a high resolution camera, this image will be of a large file size. This is not good as it will take too long to load. If the image is optimised to a really small size it will look bad when viewed on big screens – also not good. If necessary you will need to have multiple images to ensure that your website is truely responsive and looks good on all devices.

Keywords need to be researched to provide google with useful information. (Get the most back by giving google what its lacking)

A good way to decide what information should be written, is to check google to see what has high competition or what is being searched for in your area. Google openly and freely gives you all the tools you need. From google analytics to google developer, google tries to make your life easy so that you can tailor the content you write or tailor the words you pay for on google adwords. Google webmasters is also a very good tool provided by google It stands to reason that if you research and write on a topic that others have not written on, google will give your information to people that are looking for it. Simple.

Google 'Adwords' will always get you better results (In life, you get what you pay for)

It is always worth noting that google offers adwords as means to get your website noticed, first time, everytime. Search Engine Optimisation takes a long time to do and even if your website is not fantastic, you can get a head of the competition by directly paying google on a pay per click basis. They have a Dublin office and offer a free phone number on 1800 806536.

Arrow Design offers full SEO services in Dublin and have a proven track record of Success

…We do more, so you can do less 🙂