SEO: Search Engine Optimisation

Anyone who's done a bit of research into building a website has probably stumbled upon the concept of SEO; Search Engine Optimisation. If you have, you will realise it's considered important, and many people will say "I want SEO for my site, I want to be high up in the search results of a search engine". But what exactly is SEO? Some words of explanation will help you understand.

SEO - not a Simple Easy Option

There is not a tick box in web server settings that says 'enable SEO for this website', it isn't something that you can switch on. Stated simply, SEO is the process of optimising a website for search engine results. The more 'optimised' your website is, and the more work you do to generate 'quality' traffic and links to it, the higher up in the search results list it will appear. For a new website, it can take a long time to get established in seach results, so Dark Owl Design caution our clients to be wary of promises to "get your website on page one of Google".

SEO is a process, not a one time thing

So SEO isn't a switch, and you can't get instant useful results - so what can be done? SEO is an ongoing process that involves optimising your website, and also marketing it - with both offline and online marketing initiatives. If you can generate traffic to your website, and links to your site from other 'quality' websites, your ranking slowly and steadily improves. The increasing popularity of Social Media is also relevant - due to the high amount of visibility and traffic on sites and services like Facebook and Twitter, these are marketing tools that could be very relevant for your business and make a big difference in your page rank with search engines. So, if Search Engine results are critical to your business, expect to be putting some time aside regularly to stay on top of SEO activities.

A very good place to start...

If all this SEO talk is a little daunting, then don't worry - the basic foundation of SEO is actually quite easy to understand and tackle; and that is to have a well planned and structured website, that has Web Content organised to make it easy for search engines to see what is relevant and important to your business. During the design and development of your site, we will ensure that these basic building blocks of SEO activities are in place, and key words and phrases are identified and emphasised. Beyond that, we can help you understand your options, and help you make the most of your marketing activities over time.

How do you know if it's working?

We will activate analytics on your website so that the activity of visitors on your website is captured - what search result led them to you, exactly where they came from, what device and browser they are using, how long they spent on each page, and what they clicked on. Coupled with other marketing activities, both online and offline, you can track which campaigns have generated traffic to your site, and how many visitors have come on each day (and even at what time). All this information is available in regular reports or viewable online in real time, and can help you make well supported decisions in how to market your business.