As a business/brand, having a presence online is now essential to any marketing strategy. But gone are the days where having a website is enough. So your thinking I have a website, what now?
As a company that prides itself on boosting the online profile of businesses, we’ve collated a list of some of the tools and strategies we engage to reach the online goals of our clients. We hope you enjoy Part 1 of our Two Part series overview.
I have a website, what now?
Search Engine Optimisation
Whenever discussing boosting your online profile, you will hear the term SEO or Search Engine Optimisation. In essence the main purpose of this strategy is to ensure your website is recognised by search engines as a trusted, ‘go to’ site for the content people are searching for. It sounds simple enough, although there are many different factors that can feed into your website gaining popularity. If SEO is new to you, our 101 basics is a great place to start.
Even if you have invested in a well made, good looking website, your website may still not get the traffic it needs to be “findable” or have a healthy ranking on search engines like Google. Ensuring that your website is optimised for your clients to find on search engines is a great place to start. If your website has not been developed with search ability in mind, search engines may not be able to recognise that its content matches what your clients are searching for.
Keys Words for SEO
One important thing to consider is key words.
Key words are phrases or words which are deemed to be a key terms people may search for when trying to find the content on your website.
Once you have defined what your website’s keywords should be, ensure you use them in:
- The URL of appropriate pages
- The first paragraph of text on a page
- Sub-headings and
- Your website’s meta description.
The Yoast Plugin is a great tool to assist with optimising keywords. It won’t find your target/ideal keywords for you, but it will assist with keyword density, meta descriptions and readability.
We affectionately refer to this as ‘Yoast your Post’
Meta description – Think of this as a small, descriptive snippet that summarises a page’s content and in turn acts as a communicator to search engines. Search engines will pick up this information and show the meta description in search results when the phrase searched for is contained in the description. When creating the metadata for each page of your site, think about what you would search for if you were to wanting to find the content you are describing and use the key words you deem important.
News or Blog Section
Blog – So you have a website, now what? Adding a Blog (news) section to your website gives you a quick and easy way to add content about specific topics. This content should be related to the ‘key words’ (topics) you have defined for your website. You can then use this content as a vehicle to drive and retain traffic on your site.
SSL / HTTPS – Adding SSL / HTTPS to your website will add the ‘green padlock’. This padlock is visible in the address bar when people visit your website. Look up at our website address bar to see an example. A padlock is required functionality for eCommerce websites where information such as credit card details need to be encrypted. Additionally, this adds weight to your website in SEO effort – Google trust’s an encrypted website more.
