Friday 13 July 2012

What is SEO?

Now you have probably been asleep for the past few years if you haven't heard of SEO but hearing about something and knowing what it means are two different things!  So just what is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a technique that enables websites to be found when people type in certain keywords and phrases into the search box on a browser.  Say, for instance that you searched recently for restaurants in North London, those sites that came up on page one would most likely have had some SEO work to get them to the top positions and will continue to need SEO to help them to retain these rankings. An SEO company works to get their clients on to the top pages for the keywords that people will use to search for their products or services.

Search engines are not human - they are text driven.  They cannot be impressed by cool logos and impressive graphics they can only handle text - which is why the content on a website will always be the most important element.  They will need to crawl, index and process this text before they can deliver search results - effectively what you see on page when you search for something. 

The SEO process will involve the creation of backlinks - these are links pointing from elsewhere on the web to your domain.  The higher the variety of domains these are pointing from the better.  As time goes by in an SEO campaign the number of backlinks and referral URLs should increase steadily and it is this increasing number of backlinks that tells the search engines your site is popular and encourages them to rank your site more highly in the search engine results pages.

To find out more about how SEO works you can speak to your SEO company or visit SEO it Right at seo-it-right.co.uk for more information.


Posted by Frances Berry

Tuesday 10 July 2012

Social Media Tips

We can't really talk about SEO without mentioning social media and the importance that social interaction has on ranking success.  It has been proven that sites which interact socially are more likely to attain higher ranking positions than those which are static and do not blog, tweet or like.

If you are finding social media marketing a bit of a minefield here a few simple social media tips to help you get started:

  1. Create an account with Twitter, Google + and Facebook.  You can't interact if you don't have the tools at your disposal so set up the accounts and familiarise yourself with the user interfaces
  2. Monitor what people are saying about your brand and who is saying it - that way you can determine who your target audience are
  3. Build up a relationship with your followers - follow them back, reply to their messages, comment on their posts and retweet their tweets
  4. Use this information to influence those who are following you - remember it's not just what you say but how you say it
  5. Keep up with the latest trends so you can make what you say relevant - e.g. if a football team has just won the championship and you sell football boots make sure you tweet about how good the match was and what you thought of the top players - remember the point of social media is not to blatantly advertise what you do but keep people informed and interested and then encourage them to keep up with your latest news.
And finally, you need to ensure that social media is a theme that is adopted by the entire organisation - everyone needs to get in the social mood for it to be successful.

Find out more about social media optimisation by clicking here.

Posted by Frances Berry