SEO is a bit of a tricky topic. Google and other search engines (to be honest the others are almost irrelevant) do their best to provide fast, accurate information based on search requests. SEO people are constantly trying to game the system, using tricks and hacks to get a small subset of websites to the top of the results. Google and other search engines are onto this, and they’re constantly looking at the ways SEO people are working, their tricks, and try to block them, sometimes penalising websites that use the dirty tricks.
We don’t believe in trying to game the system, instead we follow the guidelines put out by Google and others, which are mostly to make it easy for Google to work out what the website is about, the services provided, where, etc. Here are some of the techniques we use to enhance a website’s SEO ranking:
- We start with the basics – title tags that describe what you do and where you do it, meta description tags, and having useful descriptive text on each of your pages.
- We check that H1 – H4 tags are used to describe the page contents.
- We suggest adding alt (description) tags to your images.
- We use various tools to check that the website is well formed, has no errors, no bad links, etc.
- We check that the website structure is sensible and easy for a web crawler to get around.
- We look at the website performance, which can have an effect on your website ranking.
- We can suggest adding https to your website, which Google has said will boost your ranking.
- Quality links to your website from other reputable websites can have a really significant positive effect, and links from known spam or link farm websites can penalise you. We know some good reputable websites that allow linking and provide an SEO boost.
This covers the basics of what we do – often it’s a case of looking at what’s there, understanding the technology behind search engines and websites based on our experience, and making custom recommendations.
Using these techniques we’ve kept our own website at the top of Google for 6-7 years, despite working in a crowded market.