Marketing & SEO

So you’ve built the website, it looks great and you can’t fail to impress all the visitors to your new site. But where are all these visitors going to come from? Most of us know at this stage that we don’t just  build a website, put it live and then expect to rise to the top of the search engines. That’s why we all need to optimise our sites for search engines to ensure we achieve as high a ranking as possible.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the  practice of optimizing a website  in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Below are some of the techniques we employ to ensure a site is properly optimised.

• Ensure your page meta title and description use keywords and keyword phrases. Don’t stuff them with keywords, just make sure they read well and don’t give the search engines a reason to penalise you because they are too spammy.
• Write good copy for the site content. Again incorporate keywords and keyword phrases in to the copy, but make sure it reads well for your visitors.
• Structure your page well. Use headings and sub-headings to break up the content and use keywords in the headings when possible.
• Let different pages target different keywords. The home page is the most important page on your website, but in most cases the home page can’t be optimised for all the keywords you are targetting. Therefore other pages within the site should be optimised for specific keywords.
• Links, Links Links. Try and get as many backlinks from other websites to your site. The number of backlinks, the relevance of the linking pages (e.g. getting a link from a website in the same industry) and the keywords used in these backlinks (the anchor text) will have a strong impact on your page’s listing. If possible try to get links from high quality websites, they will influence the position of a web page more than links from low quality sites.

Unfortunately there are no guarantees with SEO  and we could never promise to get your site to the top of a search engine for specific keywords. The important thing to remember is SEO takes patience, in most areas of business it is hugely competitive, but if you follow a structured and good-practice approach to it, over time your rankings will improve and consequently you will get more traffic to your website.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising – The Instant Hit

What we do recommend to our clients, especially ones who have just launched a new website and therefore have no search engine ranking is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. A PPC campaign enables you to buy your way to a better position in the search engine results pages that are most relevant to your customers. Your ad usually appears in a shaded area at the top of the listings or down the right hand column of the search engine listings.

Basically you define how much you  are willing to spend for each click-through from your ad.  Advertisers willing to spend the most money for  relevant keywords will usually be listed first. One of the advantages of PPC is that you the customer sets the budget. Once your daily budget has been reached then the ads come down so you won’t be charged anymore.

Apart from new sites, a PPC campaign can be a very effective form of advertising if used in specific bursts. For  example an event may be happening in your local area in two or three weeks. Hoteliers may know that most of their bookings for that event will happen three weeks before the event, therefore this would be the ideal time for them to utilise a week long PPC campaign.

One ‘important’  thing to consider though before starting a PPC campaign is that they can be expensive. Some keywords are very competitive and therefore come at a premium cost. What we try to ensure is value for money, and we monitor all the activity to ensure you get a maximum return on your investment from the campaign.

For more information please contact us for details.