What is your SEO Score?

When you got that shiny, expensive new website built for you, did you then just think, that is that, let the good times roll. Well, hopefully, you were right and business did, in fact, start coming to you instead of you tripping over yourself trying to find it.  For those who are still waiting for a call, or some morsel of digitally transduced business, did you know you can find out your digital SEO score online?

There is a lot of competition in the web design market and as the old phrase goes, “you pay for what you get”. Having your website built is a once off cost and really only needs to be updated if it is either out of date or there are product, service or business changes that need to be reflected on the site.

SEO is a different proposition and this should be clarified. There are SEO companies specialising in elevating your website from the nether regions of the web. Should this have been done initially when the website was built? The answer is ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. They are two skills that do not always operate in parallel and we have seen countless examples of sites being built that just do not rank well rendering the site pretty much pointless from the offset if you were intent on generating interest. When you set about getting a website, did you tell the web designer you wanted business to be generated from it? This is a simple assumption to make of course, why else would most businesses want a website?  But ask yourself, did you just ask for a website?

What is the point in having a website if nobody can see it?

Well, there isn’t much of a point. How do you know if your website is performing well? You get visitors and perhaps business, simple and straightforward. How do you know if customers are contacting you after having visited your site? The contact form, phone calls, analytics or just by asking them out straight is how.

If your page shows up on the 11th page on Google rankings, what use is that? Generally, people don’t go past the first two pages after performing a search. That is what we at iBrutes call the ‘dark web’ as no business ever sees the ‘light of display’ when they are there.

There are many things that need to be considered when trying to get your site up the rankings. We will try to educate as much as possible on them but this really is just an eye-opening moment on what is involved.

Rule No.1: SEO rules change all the time.

Having a mobile site is now very important in Googles site ranking test. If your site is not optimised, your site will lose valuable SEO ‘street cred’, why because people literally won’t be able to visit your site walking down the street. Nearly 70% of internet users are using mobile devices. There are still millions of sites built just less than 10 years ago that are still not responsive.

Having a mobile site is just one of the many important factors that help improve your SEO score. To view all Google’s ranking factors, click here otherwise below is a list of some of the more important ones:

1: All sites should submit a sitemap to the search engine.
2: Keywords research is important as it helps describe to Google or other search engines the nature of your site. This should be natural and pages should not be stuffed with too many keywords as this is regarded as black SEO tactics by Search Engines.
3: Fast page loading speeds
4: SSL certificate
5: Descriptive URLs
6: Fresh and regularly updated content
7: A few relevant outbound links to authority domains
8: Long form, high-quality and relevant content

It takes TIME

Of course, this list is not exhaustive, in fact, there are probably over 200 factors to take into account. This gives an insight into the many aspects of SEO. SEO does NOT happen overnight either and takes time to be worked upon and should be continuous. It can take from 3 months to a year depending to achieve satisfactory results. So below are a few more SEO considerations.

List of common SEO issues:

• Meta Title: This is the main headline the search engine spits up at you when the search engine appears.
• Meta Description: Brief description of the webpage and what it is about.
• Keyword: One word to describe what your page is about. Sometimes this is used too often on the same page. Google is intelligent and limits are set as to how many times this can be used.
• Heading: In HTML there are heading tags and these are used to reinforce a particular topic just like you would a document.
• Robots.txt: This file limits what folders can be accessed within the hosting directory.
• Sitemap: All sites must submit a sitemap to the search engine.
• URL friendly: Describing what the page is about in the URL.
• Accessibility: Must be friendly and accessible to visually impaired.
• Social Media: Is your site connected to Social Media?
• Page size and loading speed: Speed is important so loading speed is a high ranking factor. If the site does not load within two seconds. Users will most likely get frustrated and move on.
• Freshness: Static sites are not viewed favorably and need to be updated regularly.
• Links: Do you have internal and external links to other sites.
• Quality of Code: Is your code written easily to read for developers?

If your website is not achieving the results you expected from Google or other search engines, iBrutes would be delighted to have a chat with you to help get your site back moving in the right direction.