Search Engine Optimisation

Your website is your shop window. Retailers rely on passing trade to generate sales however the internet does not work this way. You have to be prominent with the search engines to attract interest otherwise your shop window may as well be located in the basement car park.

A well designed and developed website is search engine friendly and makes it easy for the search engines to understand what you do and your relevance to search phrases. However, a well optimised website relies on continuous monitoring and improvement to ensure a prominent position.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO means improving or optimising your website to help web-based crawlers index your site and understand your relevance for specific keywords/phrases. At the same time, SEO aims to improve your page ranking, in a sense the way search engines arbitrate between websites that are optimised for the same keywords. This relies on online (your website) and offline (other websites) techniques. The end result is Page 1 search results (impressions), increased visitor numbers to your website, decreased bounces from your website and increased visitor conversions to sales.

The key to successful SEO is to research and understand what your target audience is looking for when they search online, ensuring you have this information in your website and making sure that it is easily assessable by the search engines.

Content is King

Animation and imagery can be visually pleasing and impressive but it may be a long long time before search engines become sophisticated enough to understand the relevance of your website from imagery alone! Search engines rely on textual content to assess what you do or what you offer.

Keyword research is a fundamental necessity to not only determine the main words or phrases that relate to your business (they’re probably obvious!) but to understand the full spectrum of terms that are used in searches on your subject matter. In fact, many keywords are so competitive that it is virtually impossible to attain Page 1 results organically without huge investment and keyword research is vital to understand the search tail (less popular search phrases) to generate results in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Each page of your website should contain keyword rich content. However, your audience is human and content should be readable and add value to the user experience. Cluttering your content with keywords will not only alarm the search engines but encourage your visitors to bounce (exit the site without exploring further than the landing page). Many website owners get hung up on keyword density, the fact of the matter is that all content should read well and provide the visitor with the useful information they are after. Amplify partner with AgilityPR to ensure that website content is search engine friendly and visitor friendly.

On Page Optimisation

There are a number of online search engine friendly techniques that can also improve the optimisation of your website. Examples are:

• Meta Title tags
• Meta Descriptions tags
• Meta Keyword tags
• Alternate Text tags for images
• Inclusion of a Sitemap.xml file
• Anchor Links & Textual hyperlinks between pages on your website
• Emphasis on keywords and phrases in content
• Social Media friendly services
• Load Times
• Index Pages & Navigation

All of these techniques will help the search engines understand the relevance of you website to keyword phrases. In addition, intelligent website design will ensure that once visitors are captured, you stand the best possible chance of retaining and captivating their interest, adding value and converting them to sales leads.

Off Page Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation is not exclusively limited to improvements to your website. There are many techniques that rely on external modifications to a website that will improve the chances of indexing by the search engine and the Page Ranking of the pages themselves. These include:

• Web Directory Registration
• Link Building
• Social Bookmarking
• Article Marketing
• Search Engine Submissions

Web directories are very different to search engines however some play an extremely important role with the search engines, In fact, the search engines derive their results from web directories in certain cases. Registration is an absolute must for search engine optimisation. Links from external indexed websites play a critical role in determining your Page Ranking, essentially the search engine algorithms rank your page on the basis of prestige – inbound links from higher ranking websites act as a vote for the credibility of the destination page and increase its page rank.

However off page optimisation can be time consuming and prove fruitless if the links are created on sites that are not indexed by the search engines or are submitted with a ‘nofollow’ attribute.

Social Media also plays its part in SEO with the generation of inbound links through Social Bookmarking. It also relies on effective keyword research and both marketing techniques work hand in hand. Integrating the two into a coordinated campaign avoids duplication of effort and cost and ensures that the right messages are publicised and their effects measured and managed as one.

Pay Per Click

Organic SEO does not occur overnight and results will take time to take effect especially for high competition keywords. Often, the only immediate guarantee for Page 1 results is to use paid for advertising or Pay Per Click. This involved a bidding process for keyword phrases that will appear within the Sponsored Links areas of search results. Amplify can manage your PPC campaigns for you but we also recognise that a PPC campaign alone, whilst generating traffic to your website, is essentially an unlimited ongoing cost to your business. In some cases with highly competitive keywords this is unavoidable but Amplify prefer to run a PPC campaign in parallel with managing your organic SEO project with an objective of replacing PPC with organic Page 1 results over time.

Why Choose Amplify for Your SEO

Amplify is a specialist agency based in Portsmouth, Hampshire. We advocate integration across your sales and marketing technology landscape and provide solutions and services to achieve a platform that supports your business strategy. We provide CRM Solutions, Email Newsletter Solutions, Website Development, Search Engine Optimisation & Pay Per Click Services and Social Media Business Services.

Contact Us to discuss how we can help you or for a free SEO assessment of your website.