What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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When someone types words into Google which relate to your business, you want to appear at the top:

google search for small business web design

To get there requires the science (some might say art!) of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short.

There are two sides to search engine optimization:

  • on-site SEO which involves changes to your website,
  • off-site SEO which involves getting other sites to create links to yours.

Both types of SEO are crucial and both are useless without the other.

On-site SEO

On-site SEO is the art of structuring a website so that when Search Engine 'bots' scan the site, they understand what your site is about. Most importantly, a well structured site will emphasise the key phrases you wish to be found for on Google. 

Small business web design optimised web page  

This isn't as simple as it sounds, because over use or inappropriate use of key phrases can easily get your site penalised for spamming, reducing your ranking.

All websites developed by Freshpage are structured from the ground up to be Search Engine Optimized. We will work with you to determine which key phrases are most suitable to your business and use SEO tools to run an analysis on those phrases to see which will generate the most traffic. We'll select the keyword phrases which are most likely to bring traffic to your site, and build your site around those.

Off-site SEO

The second pillar of SEO is performed off-site - on websites other than yours. Search engines will analyse the links from other websites to yours. The more high quality links from relevant sources, the higher you will rank.  For example, one of the easier sources of links is to contact related websites and agree to exchange links: 

backlink for small business web design

Being on the first page of Google's search results is critical. A recent study showed that 89% of clicks are on the first 10 results.

Alex

Alex is the founder / owner of Freshpage Web Design and has a wealth of experience across all levels of web development, including Java, SQL, HTML, CSS, PHP as well as content management systems such as Wordpress, Joomla and Magento.