Vision ICT Blog 06/13
Welcome to the Vision ICT Blog.
Every month we will have a topic or issue that we will
discuss, either to do with the company, related business or technology issues
that affect YOU.
This month’s topic: Search
Engine Optimisation
Carrying on from last month’s topic, Standing Out from the
Crowd, we will be taking a look at Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) including a
special guest post.
What is SEO? SEO is the development of a website to increase
its ranking on search engines.
What is a Search Engine and how does it work? Search engines
work by finding pages a user asks for, based on the “best results” available.
The “best” is defined by SEO techniques – The most popular, the most relevant
and the longest active.
SEO varies depending on what you want to achieve. To this
end, you should treat SEO differently if you are doing it for a council body or
for a business.
SEO for business:
Businesses need to promote themselves and push themselves
above the competition. Search rankings are a constant battle between companies
to reach the lucrative top spots. Not only does a company need to have strong
Search Engine Optimisation, your competition needs to have weaker Optimisation.
Rankings are constantly changing so sometimes it can be a struggle to remain at
the top. Alternatively you can pay google to have a fixed spot, although many
people will tend to ignore these in favour of the ‘natural’ links.
Some SEO companies offer some ‘solutions’ that exploit the
search system. However, if caught this can result in a website being banned
completely from search engines. If someone offers you a 100% guaranteed top
ranking, don’t trust them! You could end up losing any search engine good-will
you already have.
For the best results, we recommend using our trusted SEO
company, Skyline.
SEO for councils:
When it comes to council websites, many will put a lot of
faith in website rankings. The truth is, unlike for a business whilst a page
ranking is useful, it usually isn’t as vital. To begin, most councils will have
an easy to find address (such as [councilname].co.uk), and if most people are
looking for the council, they will find it.
Secondly, most people search for the council will type
“[Council Name] Parish/Town/Community Council” into a search engine, and as
such the council site will very likely be on the first page, usually amongst
the top 2 or 3 links. This is purely because a specific search like that will
yield few other results than the one they want. Just searching the “Place Name”
without the “Council” might return different results, but rarely will this be
because the person is looking for/wants to see the council site.
Thirdly, if your council’s rating is a little low for some
reason and you do want to boost it (also perhaps for easy access), we recommend
contacting other large government bodies (such as Unitary Authorities and
District Councils) and getting them to post a link to your site. This will help
boost your ranking. We also can also post a link to your council site on
Wikipedia under the page about the region.
And now, a special guest post from Skyline SEO Experts –
Seeing as search
engines are the main way in which internet users browse the web, an SEO (Search
Engine Optimisation) campaign will give your website the best chance of being found
on results pages by searchers. Companies that have invested in SEO now enjoy
profitable places on Google results pages, and as up to 80% of internet users
don’t look past the first page of results, these top ten spots receive
thousands more visitors than websites found later on. Traffic increases, custom
flows and with this, Google’s algorithm recognises the positive reputation of
the site, thus sustaining its high page position.
Rather than using
Google’s more expensive service, Adwords AKA Pay-Per-Click (PPC), the organic
list statistically gives a better return on investment (ROI). 70% of internet
users only use the organic listing.
Ideally, your
online-goal should be to rank on page 1 for all your products or services.
How do you get there? Today, just think relevance. Is your website as relevant
as it can be?
A hugely important
part of any SEO campaign is building strong links from other sites to your
own.
Every page has a page
ranking, from to 0 to 10 and building links from a page with a ranking higher
than yours will have an extremely positive effect on your position on Google.
The fewer number of links on a page to other pages, the more authority these
links will carry with google and a result will have a greater effect than a
page with many links.
For example, a link
to your website from the BBC (page rank 9) in regards to an article they have
written about your council will have a huge impact on your google ranking. This
is in contrast to a link from a website under six months old or with few
visitors, which is like to be page ranked 0.
If you need any
help, please do not hesitate to contact either Rob or Joe at Skyline Marketing
- We specialise in SEO and PPC. www.skyline-marketing.co.uk
We hope you enjoyed this special edition of the Vision ICT
blog.
Until next time, stay well!
Next month – Uses of Social Media
