What Your Small Business Needs to Know about SEO

At Cyber Sushi Design, we are aware of the power of SEO – that’s search engine optimisation – which involves a lot of work if you want your business website to work at marketing your business, by performing well in search engines such as Google. The aim of this article is to breakdown some of the terms you might have heard about in reference to SEO yet not really understand how they impact the performance of your website.

Algorithm

An algorithm is used by search engines in order to identify which sites get ranked and where. There are a many factors included in an algorithm, which makes it increasingly difficult to guess the criteria a search engine is using to assess your site.

Backlinks

A backlink is a link that is incoming to your site from another site. Backlinks are significant for SEO purposes, as search engines regard a greater number of backlinks to a site as an indication of website popularity and importance.

Content

Web content is the text, images, videos etc that you choose to include on your website. Content is important as without fresh content that appeals to your target audience wants a website will be destined to fail.

Duplicate Content:

As mentioned above, websites need to include fresh content, avoiding the duplication of content found on other web pages is vital for SEO purposes. Search engines tend to penalise sites that copy content from other sites or that post content that is worded similarly, which can result in your site failing to be ranked.

Unique Content:

Posting unique, original content on your website will benefit your chance of ranking well in search engines. In direct opposition to duplicate content, unique content is text that has not been copied or slightly altered from other sites, offering a fresh perspective or an alternative way of explaining a point of view.

Evergreen Content:

Evergreen content is content that remains valid to audiences a long time after its publication. The fresh appeal of such content, that target audiences want to view weeks, months or years after it’s been published increases the validity of your website.

Google Analytics

Web analytics play an important part in an SEO campaign by tracking and reporting on traffic to your website. Such analytics show you visitor and page stats, including where visitors have accessed your site from geographically and across the web. Acting on what the stats tell you can help you build upon and improve your site to improve your ranking.

Indexing

Search engines index sites based on the information stored within a website. They collect the data from your site and position your site in their rankings based on the relevance of your site content to the industry within which it’s assigned.

Keyword Research

Keyword research and SEO go hand in hand, if you don’t know the search terms your target audience are entering in search engines to locate your services an SEO campaign is instantly redundant. Understanding your target audience and researching keywords and phrases attributed to your business and industry and including these within your website content will assist in achieving better rankings and increasing traffic.

Meta Titles & Description

Web pages should all be optimised with Meta titles and descriptions. Both Meta title and descriptions should include but not over-populated with your keywords and phrases. These tag your web pages and posts with business relevant attributes, which in turn helps search engines index your site.

Google Search Console (aka Webmaster Tools)

There are free tools available for website owners that allow them to view and monitor the indexing status of their site and optimise visibility. These tools help you understand how search engines view and crawl your site. Any issues with your site can be identified through utilising such tools.

Sitemaps

To support an SEO campaign it’s important that websites submit a sitemap to update search engines on web pages that are available to be indexed. A sitemap is an XML file that details each page of a site and details updates that have been made and the hierarchy of pages included across the site.

Hopefully our basic overview of some of the key criteria that support an SEO campaign has helped you establish an idea of tools available and protocols that need to be followed in order to make your site work for you in search engine rankings.

As a small business we understand there’s not always the time to focus on pushing your business forward through marketing exploits, that’s why the team at Cyber Sushi Design adopt a jargon free approach to support or tackle your SEO campaign on your behalf. We offer a number of SEO packages to suit various requirements, and to take us up on our offer of an SEO health check get in touch with us today on 01494 356 778.