How can my website negatively affect my brand?
Every company or organisation has to some extent a brand. In some businesses the brand tends to be more important than others. However, if one of your customers, or more importantly potential customers, types into a search engine words that they would use to help to find you on the internet – and you are nowhere to be seen in the search results – then this absence will have a negative connotation especially if you main competitor is at the top!
The higher you are in the natural search results the stronger your company is perceived.
“Only a selected few know how successful SEO works”
This is absolute and utter rubbish. There is no myth, no secret and definitely no mystery when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Successful SEO is just a matter of common sense – and a lot of hard work!
The best ways in which to optimise a website is openly published on many excellent websites on the internet – in fact we have republished the list below. Anyone who tells you that SEO is anything different is probably hiding something – like they don’t know what they are doing or are afraid of hard work!
Why is SEO Important?
Most people now know that the top 2 or 3 results following a search in Google or similar is a “paid for Pay-Per-Click” advert that doesn’t always give you the best result to the words you searched for. In fact surveys have shown that 72% of people ignore the adverts and go straight to the top of the “natural” searches instead.
The closer you are to that No.1 spot, the more chance you have of your website being seen and being clicked on.
Why isn’t my website already towards the top of the natural search engines?
Good question. Having spent what could have been a small fortune on getting your website up and running, the least you would expect now is for you to be on the first page of search results.
Unfortunately, professional designing and populating the website just isn’t enough to get you there. Unless your web designers have implemented standard SEO techniques & best practice when developing your site you will never be found very high, if at all, in the natural search results.
This is the reason why “Pay-Per-Click” advertising is so important to so many companies – at least by throwing money at a problem they will end up at the top of the page. It’s a pity however that a fraction of the money wasn’t spent on optimising the site in the first place – they could have probably saved a fortune.
Simply, how does a search engine like Google work?
Search engines are battling for advertising revenue. The more people they can get using their search engines the higher they can charge advertisers. For this reason search engine companies are very focused on delivering the best results they can to users when they type in a search.
They do this by “ranking” every website based on different criteria and show what they believe is the most relevant at the top of the results in response to the “keywords” the user typed in.
The better a site is optimised, the higher the chance of a top ranking.
What factors affect the ranking?
There is a long list of factors that will positively, and negatively, affect a website’s ranking with a search engine.
Based on a survey by American SEO experts and market leaders in SEO research SEOmoz.org the most important factors which influence your site's SEO and ranking is as follows:
Top Ten Ranking Factors:
- Keyword use in title tag - 4.9
- Global link popularity of site - 4.5
- Anchor text of inbound link – 4.4
- Link popularity within the site's internal link structure – 4.2
- Age of site - 4
- Topical relevance of inbound link to site – 4.1
- Link popularity of site in topical community – 3.9
- Keyword use in body text – 3.7
- Global link popularity of linking site – 3.6
- Rate of new inbound links to site – 3.6
Top Five Negative Ranking Factors:
- Server is often inaccessible to bots – 3.8
- Content very similar or duplicate of existing content in the index – 3.6
- External links to low quality/spam sites – 3.5
- Participation in link schemes or actively selling links – 3.4
- Duplicate title/meta tags on many pages – 3.3
With regards to SEO, what can OSL do for me that my existing supplier cannot?
Without knowing your existing supplier we cannot really answer that but we know what we can do. We can work on your website to ensure that the ranking factors above are applied to your site to give you every opportunity of climbing the natural searches.
As the saying goes “It’s not brain surgery” – it’s just damn hard work!
If my website is not at the top of the natural searches, is the situation irretrievable?
Definitely not. Give us a call on 01457 861178 and we will happily discuss your best options to improve your natural search position.
