Online marketing
Ensuring your website is found: search engine optimisation
Once you have developed an online presence, the next challenge is making sure people know about it. One option is to promote it offline—for example, in brochures, business cards, on your physical shopfront and in fliers. However, this may reach only your existing customer base.
To attract new customers who are interested in what your organisation offers but have not yet heard of your business, you may wish to consider options to improve your ranking in the results provided by search engines.
Searching is one of the most frequent activities people do online. Most people will find your site by typing your organisation’s name or words describing the types of services that you offer, or topic you cover. By designing your website around relevant keywords and keyword terms, you improve the chance of a good ranking against that word or term in the search engines, thereby increasing the traffic to your site.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) refers to methods for designing your website to increase the likelihood of search engines finding it and ranking it as close as possible to the top of the results they display following a relevant search. If your website is ranked within the first couple of search results, you are more likely to attract a higher number of visitors to your site than if your website appears on the second page of results.
SEO refers to improved positioning in ‘organic’ search results, that is, search results returned based on the content and related information about your site. If you want to advertise to appear in search engine results, you should consider search engine marketing.
The core purpose of a search engine is to provide the most relevant results in response to a search term. Search engines therefore go to great lengths to analyse and index websites, and to weed out websites that use questionable techniques to maximise their search engine ranking.
Search engines treat the methods by which they choose to rank websites in response to search terms as a closely guarded secret. However, some of the more generally accepted factors which will assist with a high ranking for your website based on relevance are listed below.
| Content | Make your website relevant. It is important for you and your organisation to focus your energy on telling the world who you are and what you have to offer. Stick to your key messages. Incorporate keywords in your writing. Frequency and location of keywords matters. |
| Text based design | The search ‘robots’ that crawl the internet to find and index websites cannot read text incorporated in images or Flash. Make sure to use text-based web design wherever possible. When you use images make sure to populate the alt attribute to describe the content. |
| Meta tags | Assist the indexing of your site by providing relevant meta title, description and keywords. Make sure the keywords are relevant to your site, and do not overdo the number of keywords. Include the primary keyword in the title and description. |
| Headers and links | Try to keep headlines, links and menus text consistent with the keyword. Use correct HTML tags for your headlines (<h1>, <h2>) and aim to use descriptive text. Maintain good cross-linking between all web pages. |
| HTML coding | Check and correct HTML coding errors in your website. The World Wide Web Consortium provides an easy to use validator service for checking for coding errors. |
| Links from other sites | Attracting links from other sites is the most important part of SEO. It shows the search engines that your site has content of relevance. Getting external links is, however, the most difficult of the SEO techniques. It requires strong content that people are prepared to link to from their own sites, social media pages, blogs, forums, etc. |
While you can employ some of these techniques yourself if you are designing your own website or content, you can also engage specialist SEO providers to assist in maximising the ranking of your site and its content. Some open source web content management systems (such as WordPress and Joomla) also provide a step-by-step guide to completing effective SEO strategies.
You should be aware that questionable practices are sometimes used to improve site rankings, especially around links. The Search Engine Guide provides an explanation of some of the SEO techniques to avoid on its page, Don’t Risk Your Rankings With Unethical SEO.
Even if you successfully engage in SEO, it is important to remember that search engines will only rank your website with basic information, primarily text, about your organisation and a website link. If you are interested in promoting your website online with images and visual displays, you may wish to consider banner ads.
For further information on SEO you can explore:
- Bing, guidelines for successful indexing
- Google search engine optimization starter guide
- Yahoo, how to improve the position of your website in Yahoo! search results
An effective SEO strategy is good for providing a consistent and a long term position on the search engines; however, it takes time. If you are running a campaign and need instant results you need to think of other strategies.
I am already online but want to get more out of it 