Search Engine Optimisation

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) by Graham Sowerby (28th November 2013)

2. What is search engine optimisation? SEO is the process of getting traffic to your website from the free (also known as organic or natural) listings on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local business listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to its users. What does a typical free search engine listing look like?

4. How do I optimise my website? • Write lots of great unique content on a regular basis • Create keyword rich page titles • Write compelling page descriptions to improve clickthrough • Correctly structure your page content • Get natural Links to your website • Use schemas to enhance your search results • Include keywords in your page content • Internal linking of your web pages • Clean web page urls • Mobile optimise your website

5. Write lots of great unique content • A paragraph of text per page is not enough to achieve high natural search rankings. • Frequently write new content for your website in the form of blog, article and social network posts. • If you refer to a product or service you offer in a post, remember to create a link to it’s page. • Don’t be scared to use a copywriter to write your content. • Make sure you have someone check the spelling and grammar on your website.

6. Create keyword rich page titles What is a page title? <title>This is a page title</title> Bad page title <title>Welcome to our website</title> Good page title <title>Pet friendly Hotel in Barrow, Cumbria</title>

7. Write compelling page descriptions • A good page description will increase your websites clickthrough rate. If you have a good clickthrough rate, the chances are Google will rank your website higher than your competitors. • Make sure you include your USP in the description and any other useful information that may entice the user. • Remember to update your descriptions based on the season or occasion, for example “Great size 9 shoe prices this Christmas”. • Try not to exceed the max character limit of 160 when writing a description.

8. Correctly structure your content • Use heading tags in your page content: • Only one H1 tag per webpage <h1></h1>. • Break up content with <h2>, <h3>… tags. • Keep styles in external CSS files to speed up your website. • Make sure your pages have title, description and keyword tags. • Add alt tags to all of your website images. • Keep important content ‘above the fold’ Google likes this. • Add crawlable links to pages only accessible via forms. • Make good use of call to action buttons.

9. Get natural links to your website • Contact other website owners that may be willing to create a link to your website from their own. • Try and get meaningful text links (anchor text) as the link back rather than just the website address. • If you can have a paragraph of text to accompany your link on the referring website that will have a positive effect too. • Aim for websites with good authority first, as these links carry more weight in terms of ranking. • Avoid websites that have a large number of external links, it looks spammy and can have a negative effect. • Get links from on topic websites.

10. Use schemas to enhance your results • A way of tagging webpage code in a way that search engines can better understand the content on your website. • Schema.org can be used to markup web pages in a way major search engines can better understand the content. • With this information Google can then present this data in rich snippets (see below example).

11. Include keywords in your content • Google is looking for web pages that offer great content relating to search phrases and keywords. So make sure you include these words and phrases in your page. • Make sure you name your images correctly, separating words with hyphens e.g samsung-cm1929-microwave.jpg • Include keywords in your image ‘alt’ tags • Include keywords in your page title <title></title> • Include keywords in your headings <h1><h2>…

12. Internal linking of your content • When referencing products or services that you offer, try and include a link to them. • The links ‘title tag’ should match up to the target page <title> tag. • Use the same title tag across your website for links to the same target page. • Link to content that may be hidden behind html forms • Include a breadcrumb trail on your website for easy navigation • Make your logo link to your website homepage

13. Use Clean webpage urls Use clean urls for your web pages. They look neater and Google uses the text found in urls in their ranking algorithm Bad urls www.domainname.co.uk/product_id=12345www.domainname.co.uk/service_cat=12345&service_id=12345 Clean urls www.domainname.co.uk/product-namewww.domainname.co.uk/service-category/service

14. Mobile optimise your website • 75% of internet users first use their mobile phone to research products and service online. • Google recommends using the ‘media query’ method for mobile optimisation. This means a websites layout is responsive to the users device screen resolution when visiting the website. • Simplify the websites navigation on a mobile phone. • Avoid any need for horizontal scrolling. • Make sure a link exists to ‘view the desktop version’ when on a mobile.

15. Don’t forget to monitor your efforts The most important free tools for any website owner Google Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics

16. About SCK Web Works Ltd We are a team of 8 web professionals, covering all aspects of web • Based in Kendal • 6 years trading • Created 150+ websites Tel: 01539 722 712 team@sck-webworks.co.uk www.sck-webworks.co.uk Thank you for listening to my SEO talk today…