SEO BACKGROUND

I’ve made a lot of websites over the years; clients are often very concerned about the way a website will look, they understand why they need a website and how it might improve their business, career or personal profile and are usually quite concerned about budget – typically looking at keeping to a small budget. However, thats often as far as it goes. What clients are often not understanding, is that the web works on a direct relationship between significant curated effort and expertise bringing significant results, which only focusing most of the budget/time/resource on design will render more difficult.

As far as google is concerned it doesn’t value beautiful sites, it values sites which are well optimised, have authority and meet a long list of criteria which it does value. Google rates sites based on the very long list of things it likes and spews out results in searches based on that. So even if you have a beautiful site google is only likely to show your site to people searching based on how your site rates against the long list of things it likes but also against all the other sites who are also competing for that slot on the first page of search results. If what you are selling or doing has a lot of competition, then your site will need to excel at more of the criteria than if there is less competiton.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a long list of things which can be done on/around a website to make google love it and serve it up to more people in search.

SEO is a not static

Because there will always be lots of competition on the web, because other sites also want to turn up on the first page in google, because the way people search, what search phrases they use and what they search for changes, because google also changes its algorithm, doing a good job of SEO when the website is built is not enough and not something that’s a done job, ever!

Why bother with SEO

In most cases people have websites because they want to grow business, sell things, grow followers or influence, share information and the more visitors they get to their site the better that will work. Without SEO a website might not even show on the first 100 pages. Just having a great design and good content will not help with this; that kind of worked back in the 90’s but not any more. It’s really about going the extra mile, a good website takes you to the half way mark, the SEO brings you to the finish line – where turning up on the first page brings more visitors to your site, which increases your chances of success at whatever your website goals might be.

A website without great SEO effort is like dressing up for the prom but not going inside. So much so, that it’s better to spend less on design and more on SEO. Unless you want to learn how to tweak and improve SEO yourself, then definitely pay monthly to have your developer continue to work on the SEO at least until you have significant traffic flowing.

I’ve only come up against a few exceptions where it wasn’t important to think of SEO, cases where the website is a resource for a known group of people, all of whom have the URL to the website. But I’ve come across so many sites, so many businesses which could be doing so much better for an SEO spend.

When I’m building websites I do a basic SEO setup, I just wish clients would understand the importance of this and buy into SEO as a monthly service or as part of a care package, or try to do it themselves – it makes me happy when a site is performing well on the goals it set out to achieve and like it or not, SEO is at the heart of this.

Disclaimer

I’m not explaining the long list of things which make up great SEO – google will serve you that if you search – I’m more keen to get low budget website owners to buy into it – to be let loose on clients websites to show what can be achieved and how it can impact positively on their website goals.

Please feel free to get in touch about my SEO services. First step is always a free Digital Analysis. CONTACT ME HERE