According to Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. SEO could be considered a subset of search engine marketing.

Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages, such as paid advertisements, and organic search results. Search Engine Optimisation, however, is primarily concerned with improving the position of a website on a search engine result page when certain keywords are entered and a search is performed. If a website achieves a good position in a search engine, both the number and the quality of visitors to a website may be increased.

Marketing Matters offer Search engine optimization as a stand-alone service in West Lothian. If we have developed your website, we provide initial search engine optimisation as standard to make sure that your website is indexed in the major search engines, such as Google, MSN, Yahoo. SEO is a lot more effective when the optimisation is incorporated into the initial development and design of a website.

My website is indexed… What does that mean? It simply means that Google, MSN, Yahoo has listed your website, i.e. these search engines have created an entry on their search pages. Indexing simply means a search engine knows about you and might show your search engine when a very specific search is carried out – for example a search that includes your company name. Not many people will know your company name though.

A listing does not determine the position in the list though – i.e. the Ranking on the Search Engine Result Pages. If you enter a generic search phrase and your website comes up amongst the first 10 results, then your Ranking is very high. But if you only appear between entries 1000 and 2000 – your ranking is very poor, not many people go through so many search engine result pages until they arrive at the page where a link to your website is listed.

Search Engine Optimisation works mainly on your Ranking and regular SEO should improve your ranking when your most important search terms are displayed.

What do I need to optimise my website for?

• What website visitors are you after?
• Do you want to raise awareness about your product?
• Do you want to sell online?
• Do you just want to be found if someone looks for a business like yours in your area?

You need to have a goal for your Search Engine Optimisation. What do you want to achieve? For example, if you are a wedding photographer, you might want your website to be displayed in Google when someone enters “wedding photographer Edinburgh” or “portrait photographer Scotland“. Click on the two links to see where his website is currently listed. If you provide a local service, you can use this to your advantage by simply optimising your website to include lots of mentions of the local area, such as Edinburgh, Dundee, Fife, etc. By optimising his website for local searches, you are likely to receive a lot of local enquiries.

How long will it take until my site is No 1?

We are asked this question often when we develop or re-design a new website. No-one can give you a time frame for this. No-one can give you any guarantees. There are a lot of companies out there that claim they get you to No 1 in Google within a week. What they don’t tell you is what keywords they use and baffle the unknowing person with. If your company is called “EazyPeazy” for example, and is located in Dundee, then this company will get you to No 1 in Google within a week and they will enter the words “EazyPeazy Dundee” and Voila you are No 1. That does not help you though, because a) you are a new business – no-one knows your company name, b) it does not take any of your website content into consideration, c) all they have done is indexed your website, but your ranking is really non-existent.

If you offer some obscure thing only people with specialist knowledge know about and if you don’t have (m)any competitors, your Google ranking can be very good within a very short time – because there are not so many pages to compete with. But if you offer something that is well-known and where there is a lot of competition, it might take you a considerable amount of time until you appear anywhere in the first 10 pages of a search engine. “A considerable amount of time” can mean anything up to 6 months or even longer.

The trustworthiness of a website is increased when visitors can see that your website is updated regularly. Websites that are updated frequently attract more visitors and these visitors keep coming back. Frequent web updates can also have a positive effect on your search engine rankings. Your website should therefore be up-to-date and display relevant information.

Depending on your choice of maintenance plan, web maintenance can include any of the following:

• Adding pages, text, and/or photographs
• Adding new content to your site
• Editing, revising, or updating your existing content
• Updating links, inserting new links
• Removing or archiving current content
• Adding new email accounts, email account setup
• Adding functionality to your site such as forums, contact forms
• Site Statistics Reports
• Search Engine Ranking Reports

Objectives

Marketing Matters offer web maintenance/content management for websites either developed by us or for externally developed websites.

Benefits

We can guarantee timely, scheduled updates while maintaining the quality of your website. During maintenance work, your website will always be live and changes are simply released once you have signed them off.

Website Maintenance Options

We offer a number of website maintenance options that can be amended to suit your requirements.

From simple Search Engine Optimisation to more complex regular content updates – just get in touch and we can discuss which maintenance option would be best for you.

The following page contains links to some very useful SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tools and a short explanation of what they do.

PageRank Tool – enter a URL and find out the PR of the website (this will take you away from the MM website!):

Google Trends – enter a key phrase – for example “Marketing Agency” and Google will tell you how the key phrase developed over the years.

Keyword Density Tool – this will detect the keyword density on your website. A density of 2-4 % is regarded as good.

What is important to get a good position in Search Engines? You need excellent and up-to-date content on your website and you need a large number of external websites linking to your website.

You need to think about the following points when you target websites for link exchanges.

If you don’t want to pay a company to do SEO for you, there are a lot of things you can do yourself which can improve your search engine ranking.

Research first…

Go to the Google website and enter the search term that you think people would enter to find your website – for example – “Web design West Lothian“. Have a look at the first 10-20 results that come up and check out your competitors. Make a note of their web addresses – such as www.domainname.com. Then enter the following words into the Google search field and press the Search button:

• link:www.domainname.com

- replacing domainname.com with the competitors domain name of course. The result pages will show you which pages provide links to your competitor’s website. Have a look at these websites and check if they allow you to add a link to your website too. Then follow the procedure outlined below (How to get link exchanges).

Another thing to do is trying to find web directories that provide listings for certain business categories. Always check if these directories are actually used and have a PR – PageRank. Some websites look like directories, but they are actually link farms – all they provide is links to websites that no-one knows. Adding a link to a link farm can do your website harm and you won’t benefit from that at all.

This is a directory you can get listed in, for example: FreeIndex

PR – Google PageRank

The Google PageRank is an indicator of how “popular” a website is regarded by Google and how much Google thinks of your website. When you launch a brand-new website, your PR will be 0 – simply because Google does not know about your website. If you then build up links that point to your website and if Google has found your website, it will start changing this PR. If you maintain your website regularly and keep it up to date, add content and so on, Google will reward you by increasing your PR. This will not happen over night though, this can take months, if not years! So don’t expect to achieve a PR of 8 if your website only consists of 5 pages. If you display lots of relevant content on your website, Google will increase the PR over time. The PR of the homepage is initially higher than the rest of your pages, but the PR is fed down over time. For example, if your Homepage has a PR of 3, you can expect your sublevel pages to have a PR of 2.

Google will not “count” links that come from website with a very low or no PR. You can either install the Google Toolbar in your Web Browser, or you can use the PR Checker on the SEOCHAT website to find out if a website has a good “google reputation”, ie. a high PR. A high PageRank is a PR that is 3 or higher. A really good PR is 5, 6, 7, 8. The highest PR that can be achieved is 10. Probably the one of the busiest websites in the UK is the BBC website – which currently has a PR of 9 (April 2010).

If a website has no PR or a PR of only 1, Google will simply give the link that comes from that website much value.

What websites should link to my website?

If you operate a website for a local Garden Centre and want to raise awareness about your Garden Centre online and want to be found by a Search Engine, you should try to place links on websites that have to do with Gardening, Flowers, Plants and so on.

Placing a link on a local bookshop website will not do your website any harm, but it won’t give you any benefits either. Google and some other search engines simply ignore links from websites that are not relevant to your business. So try to concentrate your linking efforts on websites that are relevant to your business.

How to get link exchanges?

If you find a website that you think would be good for a link exchange, search for the link page on that particular website. If there is no link page to be seen, don’t waste your time, they won’t suddenly create a link page for adding your link to it.

Some link pages encourage link exchanges and already provide a form – prepared for you to fill in. If there is no form available, you can contact the webmaster of the website by email and ask them for a link exchange. You will usually find a contact page or a link to the webmaster’s email address. You should always offer a reciprocal link on your website which points to their website. You ask them for a favour, so you should offer something in return. Usually, you would write a personal message to the webmaster of a website telling them why their website would benefit from adding your link and that you already have added their link to your website because you liked their website very much.

Sometimes you get a reply that a link has been added to their links page, sometimes, link exchange requests are simply ignored. If nothing has happened within a month, you can remove the link you added to your website because they are obviously not interested in adding any more links to their website.

Don’t just contact any website under the sun and ask them for a link exchange. This will not do your website any good and it will waste your time too.