In today’s world, we have access to the Internet 24/7. On our phones, TV, Ipads and desktops – you can access a world of information at your fingertips. Anybody who is any body is online, and if you are a business wanting to compete in this over saturated world of commercialism, then you too must have some sort of presence online.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just simply create a website and a Facebook business page and be inundated with inquiry from online traffic. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way – and just like you would your business, you need to work hard in order to get your website high in the Google rankings, otherwise how else are your online customers going to find you.

Search Engine Optimisation is a specialised industry in itself, and with Google’s constant changes to their algorithms it is imperative you stay on the ball to ensure you get a top ranking position. Whilst the team at Corporate Sound are specialists in audio productions, we thought we would also share our knowledge on SEO and how you can best optimise your website for Google.

1. On Page Optimisation

On page optimisation is a crucial element to your search engine optimisation efforts. Not only do you need a great website that is easy to navigate and contains an abundance of valuable information for your customers, but Google aims to only rank those websites offering informative and relevant information. Google determines what your website is about through:

• Title tags
• Page Headings
• Unique Meta Descriptions
• Keywords / density
• Images (with Alt Tags)
• Internal Linking
• Sitemaps

2. Clean Websites

Google loves a website that is easy to read / navigate and that loads quickly. Therefore slow loading sites or sites with lots of flash will be penalised by Google. Also your customers will get frustrated with a slow loading website that is hard to navigate and will more likely jump from your page to your competitors.

3. Good Backlinks from Relevant Websites

In the past it used to be a popularity contest based on how many backlinks you had to your website – regardless of where they came from (providing they weren’t from bad websites eg: porn sites and so forth). Since the Google Panda and Penguin updates however, Google now prefers a website only has backlinks from reputable websites that are relevant to your business and location. This is quite a complex subject, one that will require a blog all to itself. Watch this space.

4. Unique and Informative Content

Ultimately, Google wants to rank websites that are informative to their customers. Therefore, your website should contain enough information that should answer the search query.

Good content is much more important than word count, however, one sentence per page won’t help your efforts. Try to stick to around 200 – 300 words per page. It is also important you focus on one, possible two keywords (max) per page and make sure you have a keyword density of around 1 – 2% – anymore than this, and Google could potentially consider your content spammy.

Duplicate content is a MASSIVE no-no. So please do not plagiarise content from another site, nor should you copy content from any of your other pages – this could result in your page not ranking well. Duplicate content is the content that is indexed last.

5. Traffic to your Website

This is an important factor and one often overlooked. Obviously, you are investing time and money into SEO to increase the traffic to your website, but Google also uses their data to analyse if your website is of any value. So things like your bounce rate and time on website is important to Google. If you have good content, then your visitors will not “bounce” from your site (only view one page and leave) and are more likely to stay on your site. They are also more likely to view more pages.

There are many ways that you can promote your website to build traffic – such as:

• Paid Google searches
• Paid advertising – print, television, radio etc
• Blog marketing
• Email marketing

Accessing Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools will give you an insight into how your website is performing – popular pages, exit pages, bounce rates, views and much more.

If you can master the top 5 factors, then you are in with a very good chance of getting your website ranking well for your main keywords, which will effectively result in more traffic and hopefully better conversion and a bigger profit.

Search Engine Optimisation is not a short-term project, it is an area that consistently needs to be monitored and worked on. You will need a good online strategy and online marketing plan in order to ensure you continuously rank well in the Google searches.