Understanding SEO

Planning to launch a new website or considering a site redesign?
Everyone wants their website to look good and be easy to find. After all, what is the point in having a spanking new website if no-one can fid it!? Apart from making sure that the design, layout, and content of your website is of good quality, there are various things you can do to make it more of a success. That is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.
What exactly is SEO and why is it important?
SEO is an ever-changing process used to improve the visibility and ranking results of a website in major search engines such as; Google, Bing, Ask etc. SEO can’t perform miracles over-night. It is a long term effort, but one with huge benefits when done correctly. Understanding the basics of SEO will help immensely when it comes to creating and promoting your website, but it’s a very in depth subject so let’s start with the basics.

How SEO could help your business.

• • Improves website rankings in Google – For example if you are a real estate company, when people are searching for things like ‘ two bedroom apartment Marbella’, SEO is what will make your website appear on the first page of results or up in the top few. Many people don’t bother scrolling to the 2nd or 3rd page so first page is where you need to be (and not in the advertisement section either!).
  • Increase traffic to your website – Once you start ranking better in search engines, you will ultimately have more clicks onto your website. (Some sites even let you see which pages have been found through SEO which is useful) Blogs are another great way of using SEO as a tool to increase traffic to your website. Essential for showing off all your fantastic content!
  • Be seen world-wide for free – Just by doing things in a certain way, you could have people from all over the world could come across your site through SEO, so it can also be an effective form of marketing.
  • Increase in sales – If someone is looking for your specific product or service and your SEO is in full swing, then you very likely to have an increase in sales from customers who may never even have discovered you before if it wasn’t for Google and your SEO efforts.

Tips to remember about SEO
As technology and search engines develop, so does the way we do SEO. At the moment, the most important key pieces of information for major search engines are the titles and descriptions of your webpages and content. Always aim to create informative, catchy titles and descriptions for each webpage and all images.
Feel free to use keywords and phrases and have content written with SEO in mind, but make sure the website still looks natural. It should never look like it has been intentionally written to increase rankings or overloaded with keywords. If you are trying to rank high with certain keywords you will need to use the right anchor text, (the text that represents your link) as search engines use anchor text to associate keywords with webpages. This is an example of anchor text – See more marketing tips on our blog. Marketing was the keyword there.
There are many more ways to help your website rank better in search engines, however SEO is a job in itself so best left to the professionals if you really want to go to town with it. Peppermint offers a comprehensive service for content and web design with SEO. Contact us for more information or visit our website.