Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a term that you may have heard of before. It is a vital process in terms of driving the correct online traffic to your website in the competitive and crowded world of online browsing. Due to this, it makes sense that you have at least a basic understanding of SEO to gain the benefits of your online presence and to reap the rewards of reaching your target audience(s). Read our quick guide here:
What is SEO?
SEO is a process of steps that are implemented into your website to influence how and when it appears online. On a very basic level it works as follows: If your website is for your hairdressing business, you want it to appear as a result when somebody searches for related terms such as haircut, wash and blow-dry, hair highlights etc. and not for unrelated terms such as party balloons, picture frames, candles etc.
Add layers of information to this such as location (i.e. Wicklow city centre) and specific clientele (female) and you begin to understand how important it is for your website to be linked to the correct terms that people may use to search for it. Keeping with the above example, if this SEO is done correctly, it should appear in search results when terms such as “Wicklow hairdressers” or “female hairdresser Wicklow” etc. are searched for.
5 Simple Ways to Influence your SEO
Keep this in mind – pick a term(s) that you want to be associated with a page of your website and stick to it when addressing the following five points. For the purposes of this example, let’s pick a term that people may search for online and how they may type it into a search engine; let’s pick ‘Lobster Restaurant Dublin.’
1. Title of the page
So if our imaginary restaurant is called ‘Lenny’s’, they feature lobster as their speciality on their menu, and they want to drive online traffic to their seafood menu page; they should title their webpage as something like this “Lenny’s – Seafood and Lobster Restaurant in Dublin”
2. URL of the page
Following on from this, the URL of the website seafood menu page should naturally reflect the title given to it. Therefore, it may appear as something like this: www.lennysrestaurant.com/menu/seafood-and-lobster-restaurant-dublin
3. Blurb
This is the section of descriptive text that you see on under each website title on a search engine results page. It is two lines of descriptive text that offers a quick insight into the page before it is clicked into. Within this text, the required term should appear. It should read something like this: At Lenny’s restaurant in Dublin, we specialise in the freshest and finest lobster, oysters, clams and other seafood.
4. Page Content
Once the page itself is accessed, the text must contain the SEO term in some shape or form. An introductory paragraph may read: From the sea to the kitchen and then straight to your plate, lobster and seafood at Lenny’s is the finest in Dublin . . .
5. Alternative Text
A final (but sometimes overlooked step) is to add some alternative text to any pictures on the page and make sure that this alternative text features the SEO term. This can be innocuous and utilised in a roundabout way. For example, a picture of the restaurant logo can be edited to include the SEO term as its alternative text.
How Google Ranks the SEO of Websites
Google for example scans websites on a near constant basis to ascertain what information they contain. So for the hairdresser’s website, it will detect the name of the website “Wicklow City Hairdressers”, the descriptive blurb attached to the homepage “. . . our hairdressers in Wicklow city centre has been in business for . . .” and the URL of this homepage www.wicklowcityhairdressers.com/home.
This shows that the terms hairdressers and Wicklow appear three times within these constraints, so Google would give this a score of 3. If another hairdresser in Wicklow gains a score of 2, this will rank lower in the search results than Wicklow City Hairdressers. Obviously, if a different hairdresser gains a score higher than 3, it will appear higher in the rankings.
This is a very basic understanding and explanation of SEO. Here at Ireland Website Design, we ensure that we optimise all of our designs for major search engines. As much as you want your website to succeed, we also want to make sure that no work leaves our design studio without the ability to reach its full potential.
