Lets take a simple example in Google – you build Kitchens and Bathrooms.  So what you want, is that if you type in “Kitchens and Bathrooms” to Google, the first page returned is yours.

Go ahead – type Kitchens and Bathrooms into Google. 54,000,000 results are returned. Fifty-four million.

What you’ll see is something like the following:

Kitchens & Bathrooms SEO Example – Sky Blue Design Works

The top two listings in this example are paid advertisements; you can see the orange “Ad” to the left. You’ll also note that within the area we are searching, Edinburgh, they are not in fact particularly relevant. We’ll cover this topic in more detail in an article entitled “Google Paid Advertisements” but for now, its worth noting that the first listing isn’t in Edinburgh at all, and the second is a large warehousing chain. Neither of them particularly satisfy the search criteria.

The second section is a map, based on the local search area. All 3 of these satisfy the “Kitchens and Bathrooms” or “Kitchens & Bathrooms” (Google does not distinguish between the two) search, and are located within the catchment area of the search. The one that has reached the top has reviews on Google Plus, and the others have map listings on Google Maps. Again, we’ll cover “Google Plus” and “Google Maps” in a seperate article but you should note that using Google’s other services is very helpful here – remember, these include Google Shopping, Images, Maps, and Videos – and that Google own Youtube.com.

Below the boxed-out map section, you’ll see the start of the “genuine” listings; listings Google has automatically identified via crawler bots as containing the phrase “kitchens and bathrooms” and within the locality. In fact, they also contain the word Edinburgh in the URL (which places Edinburgh Bathrooms and Kitchens first) and the Meta Description (see below).

So we can see that firstly, Google searches are (for the purposes of this simple example) localised by the IP address you use when searching, and secondly, to get a good ranking in the locality for “Kitchens and Bathrooms” there are a few boxes you need to tick:

• Be within the locality. Be identified by Google Maps, and set up your location & opening hours on Google Maps/Plus.
• Use the phrase you want to be listed for in your URL, Meta Description (see below) and page title.
• Ideally, have reviews on Google Plus.

Now, lets have a look at what these checkboxes involve.

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We all know what the standard Google listing looks like:

SkyBlue SEO Meta Example

As you’ll see there are several elements to this:

• The blue section – contains the page name, then a hyphen and then your website name (as defined by your administrator).
• The green section – the URL
• The black section – the Meta Description of the site.

This Meta Description contains a piece of text describing what the page contains. If you don’t define your meta description with tags, Google will use the first 156 characters of your page content. This may not always be the best description of the page.

Therefore, its always best to manually set your meta description to contain a proper overview of the page you are promoting, and the phrase you want to search on. This phrase should also be present in the URL and the page name.

These items are always set via html coded tags. If you are using a free website solution, or a piece of open source software such as Joomla or WordPress, you may not have access to edit these as part of your page basics. You may be able to buy a plugin to allow you to edit these, but ideally you need to be able to edit the html code directly, on a page by page basis.

If you are struggling with this and need help, its worth contacting us to conduct a review of your website – once we have taken a look we’ll be able to advise the most cost-effective way of getting all your pages up to date and crawl-able.

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A lot of the companies out there looking for your business will have already contacted you. They’ll have quoted a price which either seems ridiculously expensive, or very reasonable. The very reasonable prices are 99% of the time, tricks. For example, in the past it was common to put the search term in black on your black page, repeated hundrds of times. Google can now detect text and background colour and will mark you down for this.

Recently companies would create hundreds, if not thousands, of dummy websites which simply contained an article about, and a link to, hundreds of companies – “link building”. If you employed a company to do your SEO, they might do only this, with the view that 40,000 inbound links to your site via 40,000 dummy websites, would push you up the rankings. However as soon as Google decided that this was dubious behaviour (in 2014), or more importantly, developed software to detect this action, your site would have bcomee blacklisted for abusing the system. So all the work most cheap companies do for SEO can be counterproductive.

So not only can you be paying out money for very low quality articles, blog posts and links that do not reflect your company adequately, but you can be paying to harm your business! Less than ideal.

Very expensive SEO companies generally work as partners with Google and are aware of the best practices and current rules – like a good accountant, they’ll make sure you aren’t taxed too heavily, but they won’t break the law on your behalf.

However these types of services are really more apt at the very higher end of web sales where not being at the top can cost thousands, if not millions, of pounds. In most cases these companies are fairly unique anyway, and the tier below them are using paid advertising and can still compete admirably.

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Simply put, if you have a clearly written site thats transparent to search engines, a Google Plus account and a Maps listing, and plenty of well-written content, you have a fighting chance.

However, there are other small but important considerations:

• The site must be truly “white hat” i.e. clean, well written xhtml code that conforms to current accepted standards. In addition duplicate content is frowned upon – such as extraneous copy/pasted sections, templates used by thousands of others, imagery provided for you to choose from; in short, its unlikely a free website will be white hat.
• You must get your meta data right – again, a free template website may not give you access to this code.
• Your page URL structure must be easily searchable. Once more a free template may cause issue, and even “professionally written” sites may end up with URLS that say /page=136 instead of /seo
• Pages should have more than 40 characters.
• Pages should score highly on the Flesch Reading Ease test
• The keyword / phrase should appear in the URL.
• The keyword / keyphrase should appear in 3 (out of 7) subheadings in the copy.
• The images on the page should contain alt tags with the target keyword / phrase.
• The page should contain outbound link(s).
• The keyword should appear in the first paragraph of the copy.
• The keyword should appear in more than 1% of the copy.
• The page title should contain the keyword / phrase, at the beginning which is considered to improve rankings.
• The meta description should contain the primary keyword / phrase.
• 300 word recommended minimum for page count.
• Video on your site hosted via Youtube.
• Don’t repeat content over multiple pages or sites. Content should be freely written and not computer generated.*

*This last point is very important for people using pre written template or “build your own” sites. Even if you’ve written all your content, you have no control over what code is used by somebody else using the same template.

If duplicate parts are embedded in a framework that is repeated over thousands of other websites, you won’t rank at all.

Finally, if you decide to use a temporary solution now, and then upgrade to a better website later, remember your page ranking and site crawl info will take a long time to be overwritten and updated. Bad SEO can “haunt” your domain name for a long time. So its always best to start with the closest to your final solution as is possible for you.

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You have 3 options. Before deciding, please consider the following. If you produce kitchens and bathrooms and a customer comes to you and tells you that having spent 5 hours on the internet, he has decided he will design and fit his own kitchen as it will cost him 1/10 of what you’d produce the work for, what would be your first thought?

If you are polite type, you will say, we-ell, you could, but it won’t be very good!

Considering you are interested enough to have read this article to the bottom, your website rankings are clearly important to you. Even if you are computer-literate and willing to learn, even if you want to do the SEO work yourself so that you know exactly whats been done and whats gone on, you must consider firstly that if this is going to take 10-20 hours of your time, paying a professional for 5-10 hours of time at a roughly equal rate to your company’s hourly costs is (a) a very small amount to invest for the potential returns, (b) more likely to produce those returns, and (c) time you’d be better spending drumming up sales or completing paid work for your clients.

Secondly you do need to think seriously about investing time into a website that is template-based or poorly written for SEO to begin with. Sadly we can’t keep up to date with all the cheap and free “design a website” sites out there, but what we can offer is a website review which will give you a professional take on just whether its’ worth progressing with your current solution.

Thirdly please consider that it may be time for you to commit to a new website. We’ve tried to present you with all the options available to you, but as a professional consultancy we obviously need to point out that our basic websites start at £325; when you consider the time and money you might invest in a “home-built” solution, please do weigh up the fact that our sites come with a lot of these features already present, and you can add more features at a later date. Given the fact our sites are based on our own technology with which we are very familiar, it can often be more economical for us to produce you a new, SEO-optimised site, than to take your existing site and try to optimise it for you. If you have any concerns about your existing site at all, then you should consider this as an option and have a look at our Website Packages.

To help you with your decision we’d like to offer you a code for 10% off any of our solutions; simply enter 10WEB at checkout before the 30th November 2015.

If you’ve already purchased a template site, or have an existing site and feel that its sufficient for your needs and you wish to optimise it yourself, then have a read of our basic guide below to get an idea of some of the things you’ll need to do. There is a wealth of free info on the internet to assist you, not all of it 100% accurate!

So with all that said, you have 3 options.

1. Website Review: If you think your site is sufficient for your needs and is capable of optimisation, but you don’t know where to start, then you can ask us to perform a Website Review for SEO. We’ll need access to your control panel, and we’ll evaluate your site; if it can be made SEO ready during the review we’ll simply get on and do this free of charge. Should our recommendation be at the end that the site is not SEO-friendly and needs reworked, we will discount 50% of the review cost from a new site build if you choose to use us. If the site is SEO-friendly we’ll give a quote for us to rework it, with several options for content generation and improvement (see 3).
2. Site Overhaul: If you are certain your site is SEO-ready but need somebody to perform this work for you, then we will overhaul your site at our standard rate of £37.50 per hour*. Without a full review we can’t give a completely accurate cost but can give an estimate with 20% variance. Site overhauls can take from 3 to 10 hours or more dependent on the site size and how well its been created. Get in Touch to book an overhaul.
3. New Website: if you think you need a new website, have a look at our Website Packages.

*Rates are based on 3 hours and up. No discount applies to the £37.50 rate. Costs exclude VAT.

If you are committed to doing your own SEO, read some of our tips below.