Focus on Search Engine Optimisation

We have broadly categorised them as follows:

Competitiveness, Technical, Onpage and Backlinks.

Optimising your site for search terms with relatively low competition but reasonably high search volume is the key to a successful SEO strategy.

Competitiveness

Certain search terms are more competitive than others. With high numbers of companies optimising their sites in order to rank well, improving your site’s ranking can be quite tough.

Of course, there is a greater likelihood that sites will rank higher for uncompetitive keywords so optimising your site for search terms with relatively low competition but reasonably high search volume is the key to a successful SEO strategy.

Technical factors

In order for sites to be easily ‘crawled’ by Google’s robots (programmes that scan the internet) they should be built to follow Google’s Best Practice Guidelines. These include:

• Responsively designed – Google penalises sites that are not optimised for mobiles and tablets in search results from mobile devices

• Correcting and removing canonical (duplicate) and broken links.

• Creation of XML Site Map

• 301 permanent redirects – Google’s preferred method to re-direct one page to another

Onpage

Once you have decided on a list of search terms (known as
keywords) to optimise, they should ideally be included throughout
the target page:
• URI (The actual page name)
• Page title
• Meta description
• Headings
• Body copy
• Text description of images
• Creation of anchor text links – but be careful not to over do it!

Although keywords should be included in page content, this
should not be at the expense of well written copy. Practices such
as stuffing pages with multiple uses of keywords could have
negative effects on ranking position.

Backlinks

Although no one outside of Google knows exactly how the search
ranking algorithm works, it is rumoured to be based on the
science of Information Retrieval (IR) which has been used since
the mid-20th century as the basis for indexing in the scientific
and academic community. Relevance and popularity are both
considered in order to determine importance.

Google measures ‘relevance’ through the quality of page content
in relation to keywords and ‘popularity’ by external links to sites,
which it regards as citations or positive votes. It also takes into
account the quality of the site that it is linking to.

Links should be gained organically by creating relevant and useful
content that will naturally be linked to by other sites. Buying or
swapping links is considered bad practice and can result in the
downgrading of a site’s ranking position or even, in extreme
cases, the site being completely blocked from appearing in search
results.

While backlinks from respected sites can help to improve your
ranking position, links from a site considered low quality or
associated with Spam could have the opposite effect. This is
why link building should be done with care using the strategies
outlined in the B2B Content Marketing section of this report.

Read more about how our B2B marketing consultants can help your B2B SEO here.