So you have spent your hard earned cash on a great website and are now waiting for the clients to come rolling in - you could be in for a long wait. Imagine you have bought a shop and spent thousands fitting it out with the best goods and the best shop assistants waiting for your customers to arrive. The problem is your shop is 10 roads back and nobody can find it ! What you need is to be on the main drag, or in search engine terms page 1 of Google and Yahoo arguably the 2 biggest search engines around.
Before I talk about what it takes to get a website on page 1 of the major search engines, it helps to understand what actually happens when one of your customers does a search and tries to find your company. Most people assume they type in a keyword or phrase into Google, (”fishing” for example) and Google searches every server on this planet for websites that promotes fishing - wrong !In every continent Google has a repository a bit like a giant electronic library. Every second of every day it sends out search programmes called “spiders” to seek out relevant information and retrieve them back to its own library. When a person types in “fishing” the results Google shows on the page you see come from its own library. That is also how it manages to return millions of results in millionths of a second. Imagine walking into a library and asking the librarian for books on fishing. She doesn’t take hours searching through 400,000 books to find the ones you need, she can go direct to one pre-sorted section and bring you the top 10 books on the subject.
Revelation 1 - You have to be in the Google library to get listed.
The next stage is to make sure your website is high on the rankings list so visitors see your site and contact your business. Or as with the librarian, you are in the top 10 books in the pile she puts in front of you.This is the technical bit and why you need the services of a proven search engine optimisation company like web design kent outfit HWOM. Search engines like Google are very secretive about how they rank websites but over the years professional optimisation specialists have formulated a list of around 100 or so factors that make up the ranking criteria Google will look at and work hard to meet these criteria.
The most common ones in no particular order are web structure, website design, internal linking, metatags, ALT tags, domain history, keyword density, external links, traffic volumes, relevancy of content and freshness of content. So now you have your website listed and home page optimised you think you will get your website on page 1? - wrong !
Revelation 2 - Search engines search and list individual web pages, not websites
So just when you thought had it licked, you now have to ensure each individual web page on your website is optimised, and more importantly they do not duplicate the content and optimisation of the others but all work in conjunction with each other.We are back to our librarian again. Why would she present you with a book that has the pages out of order, has poor quality information, poor quality print and nobody has ever read before. Of course she wouldn’t, and search engines do exactly the same.
Their spiders hunt through your website looking for details of content, links, popularity and so on. Well built, well structured, well written, well linked sites will always rank more highly than poor quality ones.So can you get your website on page 1 of the major search engines?Of course. Some web companies will profess to get you on page 1 overnight. Using a pay-per-click strategy they probably can. But “organic” search (the unsponsored left hand side of your screen) that is promoted by kent web design company HWOM takes skill and time.
Choosing the right keywords to promote your company is essential. Back to the fishing example. If you sold fishing waders you would want to be listed under fishing tackle, not just fishing which may also contain books on sea fishing, fishing lakes, fishing boats etc where you would get lost.The web is exactly the same, and you can be specific. Why place your company under “solicitors” a highly competitive term which may take you a long time to get onto page 1. If you are based in London and practise mainly in conveyancing you are better listed under “Conveyancing Solicitors London”. This way the competition is less and the target audience is more likely to contact you as you are meeting their exact search criteria.
So before you embark on a major website purchase, consider all your options and research your web partner very carefully.If you find all this a little too much, this is why you need a web designer and SEO professional to get your company on the web map. Contact HWOM Web Design Kent