Calm Mediacentre

The majority of people think of (SEO) Search Engine Optimisation as an art to improve their search engine rankings, being a time studied profession that, without putting a great deal of time and effort into it,should be left to the techies. Wrong! Yes, improving search engine rankings in competitive areas does require a huge amount of knowledge and expertise and search engine optimisation techies are needed, but most websites aren’t in hugely competitive areas. Many of them can achieve effective rankings by applying some of these search engine optimisation basics.

SEO is the art of achieving high search engine results, increasing website traffic. It’s when the content is set out so the search engines can read it easy and effectively, and most importantly, it is about creating real value for the searcher. SEO is about attracting visitors specifically focused around predetermined key search terms. A valuable user experience will be rewarded by the search engines by increasing your Google Pagerank. SEO is all about making sure your website delivers what it says it will!

SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimising a website involves writing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords. Sometimes a site’s structure must be adjusted too. Because of this, SEO needs to be considered at the design phase of any project and a strategy created specifically. It is critical that all the elements work together including the content and how the website is designed:

• Keyword analysis
Using our SEO expertise we will research and refine keywords into a definitive list. Using our specialised software Calm Asylum will run searches on keywords to understand how many people are searching for them and how competitive they are. The aim being to find popular search terms which are specific to your offering allowing you to rank as high as possible.

• Title tag
The keywords or phrases must be present in this tag. The priority of the keywords run from left to right in the title tag, so more important keywords are placed first. The title tag is indexed by the search engines in its own right and its influence is multiplied if the keywords within it are also used inside other elements.

• Meta keywords
Meta keywords allow you to provide additional text for search engines to index along with the body copy. Although this tag is indexed by search engines, text appearing within it only has limited relevancy as it is text and cannot be seen by the user. Like title tags priority runs from left to right, separated by commas. Keywords should never occur in meta keyword tags unless they also appear in the page text and generally should not be any longer than 255 characters including whitespace.

• Meta description

The meta descriptions allow you to influence the description of your page with search engines. The meta description has to contain your keywords and also relate to the copy on the page and be ideally no longer than 128 characters in length.

• Keyword distribution
It is essential that the predefined keywords are evenly distributed throughout the web page without simply keyword stuffing or spamming. To prevent this, keywords should not be used to often, but used in every paragraph, heading, subheading and also links. This simply allows the search engines to know that is what the content is about.

• Page URLS

Search engines love static URLs as they are sure that the pages content is less likely to have changed since last being indexed and not have duplicate information. An affective URL should be short and contain your most important selected keywords making your pages more trustworthy to search engines.

So as a round up if you have a spanky website and are fed up paying for Adwords why not contact Calm Digital for a chat and discuss in further detail how Calm can help.

So why is link building so important?

This is perhaps one of the most common questions I get asked at Calm Asylum on a daily basis. There are so many reasons why this is such an important element to any serious marketer’s online marketing strategy. So, will link building increase opportunities on my website?

My dad brought me up with the saying which I feel relevant, “slowly slowly catchy the monkey”. Let me explain…

Imagine your website is a monkey hunter with loads of plump bananas and the scout-spider-monkeys are web-bots (search engine spiders) and they are out looking for the most succulent bananas (your content) and then report back to the head spider-monkey (Google) who decides which websites have the best food to take the mob of monkeys (web traffic) to have a party with.

The jungle you are hunting in is massive and there are thousands of other hunters all setting up their traps. Meanwhile the scout spider-monkey (web bot) swings past, sees your lonely banana and carry’s on swinging (your banana is nothing special – this spider-monkey is looking for big banana plantations).

Being a more experienced monkey hunter and having a Masters in monkey hunting you have a strategy. You position another trap and monkey sign-posts (a reciprocal link or links on external sites pointing to your site) and continue to lay out traps until you have loads of traps covering the ground.

Now when the scout spider monkey swings by it sees loads of big juicy bananas (content) and goes and tells head spider monkey (Google) what fantastic big juicy bananas it has found.

The head spider monkey will then organize a monkey mob rave and have a banging party (web traffic to your website)!

I hope this all made sense and the moral of the story is CONTENT (bananas) IS KING !!!!!!

If you are unsure if your current strategy give us a call and let’s talk monkey nuts (and bananas).

To play one of our favourite monkey games, click here.