by Charlotte

In recent months you’ll probably have heard a lot of people talking about SEO, well if you’re not sure what it means and are too afraid to ask, it stands for search engine optimisation. SEO basically tries to make sure that whenever someone searches for words related to your business on sites such as Google, you appear nice and high up in the search engine listings.
Anyone looking for something on Google will tell you that they are only really interested in the first few links that come up on the search, so it’s really important that you can keep your company as high as possible so that you don’t get lost.
In theory this sounds quite straight forward, but unfortunately it can get tricky. Search engines use complicated methods to decide where sites come in their listings.
Don’t fret though – because over the years experts have worked out what is and isn’t important when it comes to search engines and how you can use simple tricks to get yourself noticed. A key point to remember is that SEO is not a precise science and what works once, might not work again.

 You can follow these simple steps that can increase your optimisation and make your site more user friendly:
1. Create or build a site map – a site map is a page on your website that links to all the pages on the site in a clear orderly fashion. Search engines use links to find new pages and having the all in one place makes it easy for them to index every part of your site.
2. Make your page titles and meta descriptions stand out – the title and description of your site that you see when you come up in web searches is actually taken from the HTML code that makes up your site, specifically, the title and meta description tags. It’s important to really sell your site here to convince searchers to click through. Remember to use all your important keywords too
3. Get some links – this is a slightly tricky one, but it is pretty much accepted that the number of links you have from other websites to your site will help your SEO, especially if the links come from very well ‘respected’ sites. Getting links is tricky though and the process of ‘reciprocal’ links (i.e. I’ll link to you if you link to me) is now frowned upon by the search engines. Creating a blog or news section and filling it with lots of interesting content is a great way to get other people linking to your site for example
4. Use ‘alt’ tags on images – if you have a site that has lots of images, check that your web designer has used alt tags to description what the image is. The search engine spiders aren’t able to tell what images are, but in HTML you can use the ‘alt’ text to describe the image. Remember to include your keywords where possible
5. Write good SEO-friendly copy – in the past, it was easy to write copy that was crammed full of keywords and then do quite well in SEO. Times have changed however and this is now not the case. It is still important to include keywords, but they should be used sparingly – only a few times on each page for example. At the end of the day, your copy should always be written for your users first and the search engines second

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