By Francesca Firth on Mon 03 March 2014 in Web & eCommerce
SEO is huge. Whole agencies are now created dedicated to the marketing discipline of SEO, but for small businesses who don’t have the resources to employ a dedicated SEO guru or to outsource to an agency SEO best practice can be a complete minefield.
It is a fact, however, that 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine, so like it or not, SEO needs to be an essential part of your marketing plan.
Our eCommerce team has been working on a best practice guide to help small businesses develop websites with the best possible SEO. Once you have laid the technical foundations there is still plenty that needs to be done in order to ensure your site is being found.
How it all works
Before you start any sort of optimisation it is important to understand why you are doing it.
Search engines are run by spiders (otherwise known as crawlers or googlebots) who crawl through your site gathering the information it promotes and feed it into their main database. When someone carries out a search for your company online the results they receive are coming from a database of information retrieved by the spiders not from your site.
Because of this it is really important that your website provides all the information you want it too, in a format that the spiders can easily read. But, you must also keep up to date with an algorithm change (for example google hummingbird) as these are the commands that tell the spiders what they should be looking for.
Search engine optimisation is essentially leveraging your site to make it easier for the spiders to find what they are looking for. The more the spiders can find, the higher up the search results page you will go and this is known as your rank.
This does not mean you need a website with hundreds of pages, full of long copy in order to be top of the rankings. You just need the right information, in the right format, in the right places.
The best piece of SEO advice I have heard is to remember who your website is for. Simple.
If you know what your visitors want you will be in a better position to write for them. But don’t forget the bigger picture, for example if your site is catering for B2C, B2B or B2both.
We have developed a step-by-step how to guide for ProspectSoft CMS users which explains more aspects of SEO and the ways in which our solution can facilitate SEO enhancement.
Call 01494 486 300 for more information.
