The Importance of Website Optimisation!
I wanted to write this quick article to cover the importance of having your website properly optimised for search engines. First of all, I’d like to make clear that Website Design and Search Engine Optimisation are two very different things. Web Design covers the look and feel of your website, the layout, the functionality etc. Search Engine Optimisation will play a major role in determining how well your website performs on search engines. There’s no point in having a website if nobody can find it right?
There are really two parts to S.E.O… on-site optimisation and off-site optimisation. Off-site optimisation may involve a lot of work (depending on your niche) and should only ever be carried out by an S.E.O. Specialist. Poor S.E.O. work can severely damage your ranking or in some cases, your website can be blacklisted from search engines altogether.
On-site optimisation is the practice of ensuring that your actual website is set up correctly to communicate with search engines. This lets search engines determine how relevant the content on your website is to a user’s query. I always tell people ”A search engine doesn’t have eyes”. It can’t look at your website to see what it’s about. Search engines send out web crawlers which crawl through your website, extracting all the information they can before deciding if your website is worth moving up the rankings. It doesn’t know what your pages are about or what your pictures are of unless you tell it. In other words, having a website that looks great is not going to help your ranking if the search engine can’t extract the information it needs.
Because of this we constantly stress the importance of setting up your website correctly from day one. A lot of Web Designers see on-site S.E.O. as extra work which they should be paid extra for and while technically they are right, we don’t charge extra for this service. We see it all the time. Clients who are quite happy with their websites but they don’t see all of the steps that have been left out in the design process. We want our websites to perform at their optimum level so we carry out on-site S.E.O. on all of our websites. In a lot of cases this has been enough to get some of our clients on page 1 in the search engine results without spending a penny.. happy days!
The main point here is when choosing a Web Designer, choose one who is willing to put in the extra effort. It pays off in the long run.
On-site S.E.O. is just one of the many extras included in our Web Design packages. To see the full list Click Here
