Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation encompasses a range of techniques that encourage search engines, like Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, to rank your site higher on their list of search results

Modern search engines are very good at selecting sites with the most relevant content to the search criteria. You can no longer load a few keywords onto your page to skew the search results in your favour. There really is no alternative other than creating high quality content

How much energy you should put into S.E.O. depends on how much you rely on organic search results and on the strength of your competition

You may also consider using Search Engine paid advertising that will deliver you quality leads with a pay-per-click billing

The effectiveness of your site’s S.E.O. will depend on :

Great Content

Clear logical well-written content with sequential headings. Doing some keyword and key-phrase research can help keep your content on-track. Approach your content writing from the perspective of a member of your target audience. What do they want to know ? What will they search for ? What will give them the best quality content for their search

Having identified your audience(s), you should provide informative content that represents great value and presents that content in an attractive and engaging way

Writing great content for a website should include internal links (within your site) and links to external sites. This adds value to your readers and helps your site’s S.E.O.

Good reputation

When external sites link to your site, these links are called back-links. Back-links are one way that search engines determine your reputation and are incredibly important for good S.E.O.

The subject of developing back-links is a study in it’s own right. The more reputable the external site, the more credibility their links convey to yours. For example, a link from the NZ Herald will be more valuable than one from your cousin Frank’s personal blog

In a competitive market, developing back-links can be more in the realm of an ongoing marketing campaign. Depending on how far you want to go down this track, you may wish to engage a specialist marketing organisation

Technical Excellence

Poor technical performance will hurt your site’s search performance

As a minimum every site should have

• secure connection using SSL (https://)
• no broken links
• a sitemap (a logical map that helps search engines to index your site)
• a useful ‘page not found’ (404) page
• good page loading speed
• optimised images with descriptive labels