Definitions aside, what this ultimately means is that good SEO will help you increase the visitors to your website from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, amongst others. Not only does it involve increasing your visitors, but it involves improving the quality of the visitors.

Let’s look at an example:  if you have a website where you showcase your bed and breakfast, it would not be effective to have people who are interested in large hotels (and all the facilities and services they off) visiting your website, but rather people who are actually looking for bed and breakfasts. Moving one step further, if your bed and breakfast is located in Cape Town, you would want people who are looking for bed and breakfasts in Cape Town visiting your website and not people interested in bed and breakfasts in Durban, for example. By attracting quality traffic, you increase your chances of doing successful business through your website.

The process whereby someone searches for “Cape Town bed and breakfast” on a search engine, arrives at your website and makes a booking is known as a conversion, and it’s all about conversion at the end of the day and this is where SEO will play a major role.

Q: How do I get SEO for my website?

Good question. The answer is quite simple, SEO is an art, a practise which takes years to understand and master. Hiring an experienced SEO consultant with a good track record is extremely important, as an SEO will know where to start and where to finish. The first step on the SEO journey is to have a site audit performed to unveil everything required to launch a successful SEO campaign for your particular website.

If you understand the enormous value that effective SEO can offer your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us and let us improve the volume and quality of traffic to your website.

The most important aspect of understanding and implementing an SEO campaign is to understand how search engines work and how your particular website does or doesn’t meet their criteria for ranking.

Here are a few tips and hints to ensure that your website is Search Engine ready.

The first step of any SEO campaign is to undertake a range of audits which examine and explore various aspects of your website, and thus ensure that your website is SEO-friendly and user-friendly.

This range of audits includes, but is not limited to:

The Technical Audit

A Technical Audit investigates and unravels the foundation of your website, and thereby enables you to identify and resolve any underlying issues which may prevent your website from being seen by search engines.

This audit covers the more code related items of a website, such as code flow, code bloating and JavaScript analysis. The audit also goes a little further and looks into things such as load times, session management and URL structuring.

All of these items are essential to ensure that a website loads quickly, is easily crawled by search engines and has a solid foundation to be built on from an optimisation point of view.

The Content Audit

A Content Audit should be undertaken to determine your site content’s usability and user-friendliness.

Relevant content that attracts links is crucial to creating and maintaining web traffic. Whilst content creation and maintenance may seem simple, it’s not always easy.

Topics such as keyword targeting, heading structure, link attraction and readability are all explored whilst performing a content audit.

The Trust Audit

A Trust Audit determines your website’s SEO-readiness.

Search engines understand trust on the basis of links. The basic idea is that the more links that point to a page, the more authoritative and trustworthy the page.

During a trust audit, everything from incoming links, outgoing links and the relevance thereof are explored. Linking is a critical part of SEO and no aspect of this component should be overlooked.

In the process of getting your website SEO-ready, these are not always easy audits to undertake but, they are important. In fact, they are crucial to ensuring that your website and SEO campaign will be a success.

If you’re interested in having an audit done on your website, please feel free to contact us and we’ll help you through the process.

Always on the go and constantly busy with accelerating his knowledge, Chris has had extensive experience in operations management, search engine optimisation and web development at a number of Cape Town’s freshest web agencies.