Where does your website appear on Google?

Put simply, if your potential customers use search engines to locate your products and services, and your website is nowhere to be found when they are carrying out searches online – then yes, SEO can help.

The purpose of SEO is to help a website to be successfully displayed within the search engine results pages when relevant online searches are performed. By getting your business to the top of the search results, you can maximise the volume of traffic into your website which gives you the potential to increase sales. There are many techniques and tools that can be applied to a site in order to improve its ranking within a search engine.

So what do you need to be looking for when you analyse your website’s optimisation needs? Essentially there are two aspects of a website that matter to the search engines. Firstly the site needs to be technically prepared for the search engines which will allow them to crawl and index the site correctly.

The second, but equally important aspect of any site, is good quality content. The content of any website should be unique and engaging to online visitors. It is important that your site satisfies the needs of all visitors and delivers a good user experience.

Is Your Site Compliant?

Here are some top tips to help you to identify what’s important when it comes to your website’s design and online performance.

Is your website valid? An invalid site will affect your ranking within the search engines. You can check your websites html validity by visiting http://validator.w3.org/ and typing in your website’s URL. This will provide you with information on the number of errors, and any additional warnings relevant to your site. If there are any issues, let us know. We can help you to fix the errors identified in order to make your site valid.

Is your website legally compliant? Compliance with the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act 1995) is a legal requirement within the UK. You can check your site at http://www.cynthiasays.com . If your site fails, get in touch with us. We can help you to make sure that you have a fully DDA compliant site.

Is your website accessible? A website should be made as accessible as possible to disabled users. For example, can your site be read by a text reader? Would your site be accessible to someone suffering from colour blindness? There are ways to improve a site’s accessibility using tools such as sitemaps, shortcut keys and access keys. We can help.

Does your website have any broken links? Broken links can severely taint the user experience of your site. Test your own site for any link issues by visiting http://validator.w3.org/. If any problems are identified, we can help you to sort them out.

How quickly does your website load? There are steps that you can take to improve the loading time of your site by compressing certain elements such as graphics. We can check your website’s load speed and give you ideas on how to improve the performance.

The Right Content?

Is your content appealing? Your site must satisfy the needs of the visitor as well as the search engines. This means that your content must be unique, engaging and relevant to online users. The right content will naturally attract increased traffic as well as important backlinks from other sites that want to share information on your site.

Is the content up to date? Every website should be regularly reviewed and updated in order to ensure that all content is relevant and current, as well as to identify any errors that may have occurred within the site such as broken links etc.

Have you got the right information on your website? Search engines use certain information contained within your website to identify whether or not it is relevant to a particular keyword search. So, if the right information is not visible in your website, you are missing out on traffic from the search engines. We can work with you to make sure that your website is designed with the right keyword information in order to improve its visibility to search engines.

Are your website pages indexed on all the major search engines? The visibility of your site will be greatly improved if pages are indexed on as many search engines as possible. We can analyse your site with this in mind and can make submissions to any search engines that are not currently indexing pages.