Business Blog:
SEO. Search Engine Optimisation. It’s a phrase that’s thrown around a lot these days, especially when it comes to businesses, but what does it actually mean? If your business is just beginning to get off the ground, then getting nitty gritty with the world of SEO can make a whole world of difference.
Put simply, Search Engine Optimisation means exactly what you’d expect it to – it’s the art of making your website friendlier for search engines (though primarily Google, if we’re honest.) This helps your website rank higher in search engine results, meaning that more people discover it. More people discover your website and more people are likely to discover your business – meaning more customers. If you’re running a dog grooming business, you’d ideally want to be one of the top results when someone from your area Google’s ‘dog grooming’ – right? In a nutshell, that’s what SEO is all about.
Of course, you don’t need to be an absolute SEO wizard to make your website – and business – more search engine optimised. Even a simple awareness of how it works can make an incredible amount of difference. Below we’ve compiled some introductory guidelines when it comes to the world of SEO. We’ll admit it, we’re just scratching the surface, and so we’ve listed some handy resources later on if you want to go further down that rabbit hole. But for now, here are some things to bear in mind when getting into the world of SEO.
Simple And Straightforward
Our first tip when it comes to SEO? Don’t overcomplicate things. Looking online, you’re bound to find a wild amount of advice on search engine optimisation – lots of it outdated. So, to start things off, we’re going to give a piece of advice that we’re pretty certain is never going to go out of date: keep your website straightforward. Don’t bloat it out and fill it up with tons of unnecessary information.
Of course, how many pages your website needs is going to depend largely on what sort of business you’re running. Perhaps you’re trying to put together some sort of online encyclopedia – in which case you’re probably going to need lots of pages. All we’re saying is, make every one of them count. If your website is hard to navigate and full of unnecessary and repetitious information, then it’s just going to make it harder for search engines like Google to crawl it. Keeping things uncomplicated will make sure that they can reach the important stuff easily. And, to be honest, this isn’t just a good habit to get into for SEO reasons – keeping things straightforward also makes it easier for customers to navigate your website when they stumble upon it. They want to be able to find what they need as easily as possible – so why hinder them?